Saving the planet starts with a farmer

Agriculture is the key sector to save our planet and humanity: the sector is a major emitter of greenhouse gases, it consumes 70 percent of our freshwater, it employs the majority of people in the developing world and particularly the world's poor. Agriculture is where the fight for a better world starts, with gender equality included in this list (women own a minority of the land, yet the burden of many hard-labor agriculture activities are on them). If we fail agriculture, hence rural people, we fail the whole planet.

Digital technologies are transforming agriculture in a way that most people do not realize. We need this because we want to reduce the hard labor of rural people, and we want farmers and their families to increase their income. Digital technology can put ourselves on the right track to support sustainable agriculture. Yet, the risks of applying new technologies are huge. History showed that technology is not neutral, and elites worldwide use it to consolidate their position of power. If we apply technology to extract thousand-year farmers' knowledge to feed black boxes that will instruct machines about producing food on their behalf, we may reduce the environmental impact of agriculture but will jeopardize the fabric of rural societies.

We thus need to explore new ways to co-create digital-enabled solutions with farmers. We need to reinvent how knowledge is shared: old extension services do not work anymore, and farmers have limited capacity to invest in private advisory services. We need to create new models, such as data-driven platforms with farmers' organizations so that farmers become owners of data and producers of information and knowledge. They would be in control of the data, information, and knowledge that they share with third parties. The talk will mobilize the audience to create a collaborative open-source knowledge architecture to create digital solutions for agriculture and support the next generation of farmers worldwide.