Director-General’s field visit in Bali: Sustaining Bali farmers’ lives and livelihoods in the digital world

Bali, Indonesia - FAO Director-General QU Dongyu visited a UNESCO world heritage site, the Jatiluwih Rice Terrace, as part of a field visit on the last day of the G20 Agriculture Ministerial Meeting in Bali. Together with a number of G20 Ministers of Agricultures and officials, he had the opportunity to interact with local officials and farmers as well as to taste locally produced Balinese tropical produces, such as coconut, banana, organic coffee, and mangosteens.

The Director-General also joined a group of woman farmers in their ritual performance of dancing and singing followed by rice pounding, a tradition of Balinese women.

Real time mobile application as solution to farmers’ problems

Qu also visited the FAO project on e-agriculture showcasing the use of mobile phone application under the FAO flagship 1000 Digital Village Initiative, where he witnessed the demonstration of the mobile application and dashboard system to gather real time and comprehensive data from on-farm activities in the area.

The mobile application assists extension workers in collecting integrated data from the field in collaboration with the coffee producers in Pajahan, Bali and rice farmers in Yogyakarta, Central Java. The collected data is connected directly with the Agricultural War Room (AWR), a digital control room at the Ministry of Agriculture in Jakarta, monitoring the farmers work and situation at the central level.

FAO has also assisted the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture in developing a comprehensive National E-Agriculture Strategy, which focuses on guiding agriculture data integration to enhance digital agriculture in the country.

Mass Rabies Vaccination for wellbeing of the Bali farmers

Finally, the FAO DG visited a mass Rabies vaccination at the Balai Banjar Belah, Luwus Village and participated in the World Rabies Day celebration together with the Secretary General of the Ministry of Agriculture of Indonesia, where he interacted with the local Balinese veterinarians and school children.

FAO has been supporting the Rabies control programme in Bali following the One Health Approach. FAO’s technical support helped achieve significant reduction of more than 70 percent of animal cases and almost 100 percent of human cases in 2012 and 2013. Following a rabies re-incursion in Bali in 2014, and intensive programme was implemented by FAO in 2016 together with the Ministry of Agriculture that has largely helped reduce cases of Rabies.

Since 2011, FAO has worked together with the Indonesian government to control rabies in several provinces through awareness campaigns, capacity building, Dog Population Management (DPM) pilot programmes, rabies cadre empowerment, and provision of vaccines and information systems using the One Health approach.