Resilience of livelihoods and communities to livestock disease threats is essential to break out the poverty cycle and improve food security and nutrition. There is no resilience package per se for animal health at FAO but many animal health projects actually boost resilience of livelihoods and communities. These inputs can be seen from different perspectives, including:
the work that FAO is doing on avian influenza and other infectious threats of animal origin is a good example of synergies between capacity development and resilience building for the wellbeing of the vulnerable populations;
all the FAO animal health projects in the field particularly in pastoral communities that are prone to natural disasters are designed to improve their resilience to drought for instance.
integrated approaches including strategic mass vaccination associated with other control measures such as intensified surveillance to reduce the incidence of disease can significantly contribute to building resilience of livelihoods and communities. A good example is the vaccination programme against the deadly disease called Peste des Petits Ruminants in Somalia, Kenya and other countries in Africa
there is also evidence that bringing veterinary services to remote areas leads to better nutrition and resilience for pastoralist households.
when animal disease outbreaks are detected quickly, communities can respond faster, curb epidemics, and save lives. This contributes to building resilient animal health systems.
IT tools can highly contribute to the abovementioned activities and approaches for livestock health that support resilience of livelihoods and communities. Some already do it. IT tools can be animal disease platforms for early disease warning, such as the FAO global EMPRES-i platform. They can also be national or regional platforms. Some mobile apps can help capture the data to be transferred to the information platform. They can also be IT tools to be used for fieldwork, especially to collect information (even pictures) on sites, animals, collected samples during surveillance of animal diseases. These tools ensure standardization of surveillance data, improved data analysis, quality check of these data and traceability. There is a high degree of flexibility on the location and data access to servers for these data. They can also be standardised assessment tools, with their mobile app for easy application and portal to enable data to be stored, compiled and analysed, such as the FAO Laboratory Mapping Tool.
At the risk of appearing a trifle pompous, I'd like to sketch a holistic cenceptual framework in which ICT could be integrated into agriculture when suitable.
It will be generally agreed that our fundamental need for nutrition creates the need for agriculture as a means of satisfying the former.
Later in our social evolution, when division of labour was established, bartering food for goods and some services became common. Still later, bartering exchange was replaced by food and money changing hands. In both instances, it remains an exchange of values, though not always equitable.
When we emphasise introduction of ICT mainly to enhance the resilience of trade/monetary aspect of the transaction I cannot help feeling that we are doing more for the intermediaries, i.e., various buyers and sellers in the middle more than for the actual food producers and end.users.
True, they serve a certain function in a food system, but I think the food producers and the end-users have logical priority over them.
I do not know to what extent its suitability has been ascertained before ICT has been proposed as an adjunct to resilient agriculture.
Unless there is an adequate transport, storage and equitable sales facilities, ICT could make little contribution to agricultural resilieince.
Until now, we have neglected to examine how much our past activities both within and without agriculture have contributed to increase the magnitude of events that threaten a smooth practise of agriculture and animal husbandry. I need not mention events like the Disaster around Aral sea which nothing short of a miracle could mitigate.
Therefore, I suggest that we concentrate our efforts more to ascertaining how we could use ICT in identifying future potential threats to agriculture, and then disseminating information on the best possible means of mitigating them and replacing resilience-threatening methods by more rational approaches.
Once this crucial step has been taken, we can ascertain how it may be used to help both end-users i.e., actual eaters of meals, and food producers, and the intermediaries.
Resilience of a system is its ability to recuperate quickly from the damages caused by a disaster. There are several ways in which people in the field cope with the disasters locally and try to limit the damages of the disaster by adopting various techniques. Documentation of several such practices and technologies and its dissemination through online platforms can prove to be very beneficial. TECA (FAO) is one such ICT medium which documents and shares several successful practices and technologies which have helped in improving resilience. Examples of several succesful implementations are given below:
Dear all, I read various posts and I have a wide perspective on what resilience could be. For my own perspective, At the level of smallholder agriculture, resilience can be understood as an aptitude of smallholders farmers to deal with environmental (the surrounding environment of their farm, combining physical, institutional and temporal) constraints in such a way to assure their function which could be of subsistence primarily and commercial purposes. ICT in this perspective, can trigger the development of Technical innovations and organizationnal ones. Technical innovations is linked directly to production systems, while trying to achieve the so called "precision agriculture", providing the exact input at the time needed to improve productivity. The difficulty therefore is the adaptability (practical use, affordability, availability, etc.) of such innovations to rural populations. ICT Technical innovations in resilience project may help in shifting producing techniques, therefore focused in agriculture advice delivery and involving farmers in the co-design of new production systems through ICT platforms. The organizational input of ICT in resilience could be at the market level, while technical contribution seems to be limited by adoptability. Using ICT can help to stabilize markets in some case of assymetry of information by providing producers on current prices. Programs can use ICT to help local farmers capacity building by promoting a local community of ICT users, developping a latform of exhange within rural communities.
Resilience in agriculture systems requires the ability to respond to changes in market and climate. ICT enables scientists to develop models based on real time data along with GIS information to help in decision planning. The challenge is to make these models more resilient by capturing data from remote sensors to enable machine learning. However, I don't think this needs to involve an expensive array of high tech remote sensors, which would exclude a large proportion of farmers. I think we can use producers/growers on the ground to feed back current conditions which can be used to validate models and or satellite imagery.
In most african countries and in particular Kenya, Farmers have suffered serious losses due to use of counterfeit herbicides, seeds and other inputs. Efforts have been put in place by government agencies to put up an sms coding system to help farmers detect and identify the source, Quality of farm input they purchase. Thus traceability of the inputs up to the manufacturing level. TGHis has enabled farmers spring up from low yields to super production.However, uptake of the sms product has been quite low doue to poor communication to the target populace.
Enfocado en lo que varios de nuestros participantes en el foro relacionado a lo que significa resilencia lo cual se ha mencionado solo quisiera aportar dando un ejemplo de como las TIC ayudan a desarrollar la capacidad de resilencia antes los embates de la naturaleza. Recién tuvimos la vista de un amigo no muy desaedo el Huracán Otto, quien toco las costa de nuestros País. Gracias a las TIC ya se sabía la ruta que llevaba el Huracán y con anticipación se conocía donde exactamente iba a toca tierra, como realmente sucedió, dando con esto tiempo a que el gobierno tomará las prevenciones necesarias para evacuar comunidades enteras, salvando con ello muchas vidas. Igualmente hubo un día de la semana donde habia multi desastres. Por un lado el Huracán Otto en la Costa atlántica de nuestro país y por el otro lado teníamos el impacto de un terremoto de 6.9 o 7 grados en el pacífico. Se activo todo el sistema de alerta de TSUNAMI en Nicaragua y de esta forma aun cuando no hubo TSUNAMI si se trabajo en función de la prevención. En todas estas situiaciones las TIC, la organización de la comunidad y un gobierno responsable como el que tenemos jugaron un papel fundamental para prevenir grandes desastres y perdidas humanas en estas situaciones que como todos sabemos son inpredectibles.
Focused on what several of our participants in the forum related to what resilience means, I would like to contribute by giving an example of how ICTs help to develop resilience before the onslaught of nature. We recently had the sight of Hurricane Otto, who touched the coast of our country. Thanks to ICTs we already knew the route that the Hurricane took and knew in advance where exactly it was going to land, as it happened, giving the government the time to take the necessary preventions to evacuate whole communities, thus saving many Lives. There was also a day of the week where there were multiple disasters. On the one hand Hurricane Otto on the Atlantic coast of our country and on the other side we had the impact of an earthquake of 6.9 or 7 degrees in the Pacific. The entire TSUNAMI alert system was activated in Nicaragua and this way, even though there was no tsunami the work was carried out in terms of prevention. In all these situations ICT, community organization and responsible government such as the one we have played a key role in preventing major disasters and human losses in these situations, which as we all know are unpredictable.
Sonigitu Ekpe-AjiMinitry of International Development CooperationNigeria
Great contribution from friends and fellows here so far. I tend to follow behind Richard Heeks last paragraph, 'Unless we have some framework or model of resilience, then we can’t understand how to target, design or evaluate ICT interventions in agriculture'. What is the current values and standards created for the rural dweller to organise his or her life? Poverty continues to increase as the farming family continue to reproduce children with good care and adequate provision.
The level of awareness provide for quality decision and approaches in utilizing knowledge for sustainable development.
What are the monitoring mechanism for continuity in government agricultural policies among under-developed countries?
How can we be resilience without an integrated cross sectoral approach than promotes orderliness and rule of law?
What approaches have be put in place to evalute open data and estimated data in the agricultural sector as supply by countries especially in Africa?
A lot of indicators are required to understand the workability of ICT in supporting rural farmers resilience.
Resilience is bouncing back to normal. ICTs help in resilience as there are several stages where farmer requires information to strengthen the planning and minimizing risk of cultivation. Information related to cultivation practices such as varietal characters, fertigation schedule, pest control methods, irrigation schedule, mechanization, planting and harvesting schedule, inter-cropping, crop rotation, etc may be classified under strategic information. Information about most suitable production and protection technologies is required for optimum and sustainable crop production.
Information on past trends regarding area, production, productivity, consumption, utilization, pest attack, climatic conditions, environmental concerns, fertigation, etc are of immense use in making decision in crop production. For example, past trends in climatic conditions may help growers in scheduling cultivation activities for optimum production and control of stresses.
Resilience of livelihoods and communities to livestock disease threats is essential to break out the poverty cycle and improve food security and nutrition. There is no resilience package per se for animal health at FAO but many animal health projects actually boost resilience of livelihoods and communities. These inputs can be seen from different perspectives, including:
IT tools can highly contribute to the abovementioned activities and approaches for livestock health that support resilience of livelihoods and communities. Some already do it. IT tools can be animal disease platforms for early disease warning, such as the FAO global EMPRES-i platform. They can also be national or regional platforms. Some mobile apps can help capture the data to be transferred to the information platform. They can also be IT tools to be used for fieldwork, especially to collect information (even pictures) on sites, animals, collected samples during surveillance of animal diseases. These tools ensure standardization of surveillance data, improved data analysis, quality check of these data and traceability. There is a high degree of flexibility on the location and data access to servers for these data. They can also be standardised assessment tools, with their mobile app for easy application and portal to enable data to be stored, compiled and analysed, such as the FAO Laboratory Mapping Tool.
At the risk of appearing a trifle pompous, I'd like to sketch a holistic cenceptual framework in which ICT could be integrated into agriculture when suitable.
It will be generally agreed that our fundamental need for nutrition creates the need for agriculture as a means of satisfying the former.
Later in our social evolution, when division of labour was established, bartering food for goods and some services became common. Still later, bartering exchange was replaced by food and money changing hands. In both instances, it remains an exchange of values, though not always equitable.
When we emphasise introduction of ICT mainly to enhance the resilience of trade/monetary aspect of the transaction I cannot help feeling that we are doing more for the intermediaries, i.e., various buyers and sellers in the middle more than for the actual food producers and end.users.
True, they serve a certain function in a food system, but I think the food producers and the end-users have logical priority over them.
I do not know to what extent its suitability has been ascertained before ICT has been proposed as an adjunct to resilient agriculture.
Unless there is an adequate transport, storage and equitable sales facilities, ICT could make little contribution to agricultural resilieince.
Until now, we have neglected to examine how much our past activities both within and without agriculture have contributed to increase the magnitude of events that threaten a smooth practise of agriculture and animal husbandry. I need not mention events like the Disaster around Aral sea which nothing short of a miracle could mitigate.
Therefore, I suggest that we concentrate our efforts more to ascertaining how we could use ICT in identifying future potential threats to agriculture, and then disseminating information on the best possible means of mitigating them and replacing resilience-threatening methods by more rational approaches.
Once this crucial step has been taken, we can ascertain how it may be used to help both end-users i.e., actual eaters of meals, and food producers, and the intermediaries.
Resilience of a system is its ability to recuperate quickly from the damages caused by a disaster. There are several ways in which people in the field cope with the disasters locally and try to limit the damages of the disaster by adopting various techniques. Documentation of several such practices and technologies and its dissemination through online platforms can prove to be very beneficial. TECA (FAO) is one such ICT medium which documents and shares several successful practices and technologies which have helped in improving resilience. Examples of several succesful implementations are given below:
Many other technologies and practices on a wide range of agricultural topics are available at www.teca.fao.org
Dear all, I read various posts and I have a wide perspective on what resilience could be. For my own perspective, At the level of smallholder agriculture, resilience can be understood as an aptitude of smallholders farmers to deal with environmental (the surrounding environment of their farm, combining physical, institutional and temporal) constraints in such a way to assure their function which could be of subsistence primarily and commercial purposes. ICT in this perspective, can trigger the development of Technical innovations and organizationnal ones. Technical innovations is linked directly to production systems, while trying to achieve the so called "precision agriculture", providing the exact input at the time needed to improve productivity. The difficulty therefore is the adaptability (practical use, affordability, availability, etc.) of such innovations to rural populations. ICT Technical innovations in resilience project may help in shifting producing techniques, therefore focused in agriculture advice delivery and involving farmers in the co-design of new production systems through ICT platforms. The organizational input of ICT in resilience could be at the market level, while technical contribution seems to be limited by adoptability. Using ICT can help to stabilize markets in some case of assymetry of information by providing producers on current prices. Programs can use ICT to help local farmers capacity building by promoting a local community of ICT users, developping a latform of exhange within rural communities.
Resilience in agriculture systems requires the ability to respond to changes in market and climate. ICT enables scientists to develop models based on real time data along with GIS information to help in decision planning. The challenge is to make these models more resilient by capturing data from remote sensors to enable machine learning. However, I don't think this needs to involve an expensive array of high tech remote sensors, which would exclude a large proportion of farmers. I think we can use producers/growers on the ground to feed back current conditions which can be used to validate models and or satellite imagery.
In most african countries and in particular Kenya, Farmers have suffered serious losses due to use of counterfeit herbicides, seeds and other inputs. Efforts have been put in place by government agencies to put up an sms coding system to help farmers detect and identify the source, Quality of farm input they purchase. Thus traceability of the inputs up to the manufacturing level. TGHis has enabled farmers spring up from low yields to super production.However, uptake of the sms product has been quite low doue to poor communication to the target populace.
Enfocado en lo que varios de nuestros participantes en el foro relacionado a lo que significa resilencia lo cual se ha mencionado solo quisiera aportar dando un ejemplo de como las TIC ayudan a desarrollar la capacidad de resilencia antes los embates de la naturaleza. Recién tuvimos la vista de un amigo no muy desaedo el Huracán Otto, quien toco las costa de nuestros País. Gracias a las TIC ya se sabía la ruta que llevaba el Huracán y con anticipación se conocía donde exactamente iba a toca tierra, como realmente sucedió, dando con esto tiempo a que el gobierno tomará las prevenciones necesarias para evacuar comunidades enteras, salvando con ello muchas vidas. Igualmente hubo un día de la semana donde habia multi desastres. Por un lado el Huracán Otto en la Costa atlántica de nuestro país y por el otro lado teníamos el impacto de un terremoto de 6.9 o 7 grados en el pacífico. Se activo todo el sistema de alerta de TSUNAMI en Nicaragua y de esta forma aun cuando no hubo TSUNAMI si se trabajo en función de la prevención. En todas estas situiaciones las TIC, la organización de la comunidad y un gobierno responsable como el que tenemos jugaron un papel fundamental para prevenir grandes desastres y perdidas humanas en estas situaciones que como todos sabemos son inpredectibles.
Focused on what several of our participants in the forum related to what resilience means, I would like to contribute by giving an example of how ICTs help to develop resilience before the onslaught of nature. We recently had the sight of Hurricane Otto, who touched the coast of our country. Thanks to ICTs we already knew the route that the Hurricane took and knew in advance where exactly it was going to land, as it happened, giving the government the time to take the necessary preventions to evacuate whole communities, thus saving many Lives. There was also a day of the week where there were multiple disasters. On the one hand Hurricane Otto on the Atlantic coast of our country and on the other side we had the impact of an earthquake of 6.9 or 7 degrees in the Pacific. The entire TSUNAMI alert system was activated in Nicaragua and this way, even though there was no tsunami the work was carried out in terms of prevention. In all these situations ICT, community organization and responsible government such as the one we have played a key role in preventing major disasters and human losses in these situations, which as we all know are unpredictable.
Great contribution from friends and fellows here so far. I tend to follow behind Richard Heeks last paragraph, 'Unless we have some framework or model of resilience, then we can’t understand how to target, design or evaluate ICT interventions in agriculture'. What is the current values and standards created for the rural dweller to organise his or her life? Poverty continues to increase as the farming family continue to reproduce children with good care and adequate provision.
The level of awareness provide for quality decision and approaches in utilizing knowledge for sustainable development.
What are the monitoring mechanism for continuity in government agricultural policies among under-developed countries?
How can we be resilience without an integrated cross sectoral approach than promotes orderliness and rule of law?
What approaches have be put in place to evalute open data and estimated data in the agricultural sector as supply by countries especially in Africa?
A lot of indicators are required to understand the workability of ICT in supporting rural farmers resilience.
Resilience is bouncing back to normal. ICTs help in resilience as there are several stages where farmer requires information to strengthen the planning and minimizing risk of cultivation. Information related to cultivation practices such as varietal characters, fertigation schedule, pest control methods, irrigation schedule, mechanization, planting and harvesting schedule, inter-cropping, crop rotation, etc may be classified under strategic information. Information about most suitable production and protection technologies is required for optimum and sustainable crop production.
Information on past trends regarding area, production, productivity, consumption, utilization, pest attack, climatic conditions, environmental concerns, fertigation, etc are of immense use in making decision in crop production. For example, past trends in climatic conditions may help growers in scheduling cultivation activities for optimum production and control of stresses.