Foreword, World Economic Forum Insight Report: Agritech: Shaping Agriculture in Emerging Economies, Today and Tomorrow, April 2024
As the world grapples with the challenges of climate change, shifts in geopolitical dynamics, pressure on natural resources and rising pollution, ensuring food security for the ever-increasing global population becomes more and more important. Transforming agricultural production, using technology to enhance efficiency and promote sustainability, is an essential part of the solution to this problem.
While agritech technologies have existed for a decade, they have been seen as point solutions mainly focused on farm management rather than as a package of resources that can address critical interrelated inefficiencies in agriculture value chains from crop planning to consumption. It is imperative that agriculture is viewed from a systems perspective, as an interrelated chain of activities and actors. The use of artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), internet of things (IoT) devices, robotics, blockchain and drones is providing tools for farmers, traders, logistics providers and food-processing plants to bring about this change in the agricultural sector and make it a more agile, better-informed and well-connected system.
However, such transformation should be made in line with principles of inclusivity, affordability, accessibility and collaboration. It is important that the smallholders and women who contribute significantly to global food production are not left behind. Excluding them would have a directly negative impact on global food production levels, especially in developing nations. It is also imperative to ensure that agritech services are affordable and easily accessible through both digital and “phygital” (combining human and digital channels) means to ensure effective outreach and adoption of tech at the last mile. Lastly, collaboration is the key to unlocking the other three principles. Given the complexities of the agriculture sector, working in isolation will not help the world community address the global challenge of food security.
In 2021, the World Economic Forum’s Artificial Intelligence for Agriculture Innovation (AI4AI) initiative published a community paper documenting a range of agritech services from crop planning to harvesting, and shared a roadmap of how to work collaboratively with stakeholders in scaling these agritech services in Indian agriculture. We are pleased to present this report as a sequel to the 2021 community paper. It aims to provide a macro-level view of the integration of technologies needed to deliver systemic change in the agriculture sector and plot a way forward. We hope it will create interest among governments, the private sector – including start-ups – civil society organizations, farmers’ groups and other stakeholders and help them find ways to collaborate, ensuring the greater vision of “inclusive tech for food security for all”.
With: Sanjeev Krishan, Chairperson, PwC in India; Purushottam Kaushik, Head, Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution India, World Economic Forum
Image: Ahmet Kurt for Unsplash
