Focus on FAO-ITU E-agriculture Solutions Forum 2018

The E-agriculture Solutions Forum 2018 was held from 15 to 17 November 2018 and was organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The meeting was hosted by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the P.R. of China and in partnership with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Engineering (CAAE).

This edition of the forum (read about previous solution here) saw more than 250 participants from 40 countries and about 50 speakers in attendance from the agriculture and the ICT sector who are involved in developing and deploying ICT for agriculture solutions. Besides bringing together stakeholders, the Forum also sought to share knowledge on successful E-Agriculture solutions and identifying ways of scaling up their implementations.

Presentations at the ESF 2018

The presentations of the forum can be downloaded from this page

Some notable highlights include, the sustainable ICTs for Agriculture and Global Trends – which highlighted the role of digital technologies in agriculture and also within the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Some technologies that are set to facilitate the achievement of SDGs are, Group 1 (Satellite Imagery; GIS; Drones: IOTs), Group 2 (Mobile Broadband; Satellite,) Group 3, Cloud Computing, Digital Platforms and Analytics, AI, Block chains, etc.) and Group 4 (mobile technologies).

In the National Agriculture Goals session, the following Ministries of Agriculture were represented – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Fiji, Pakistan, Mongolia and Samoa. They shared their respective national agriculture priorities and challenges they face and how they innovatively include and seek to include technology into their plans.

The session on E-Agriculture in Action, saw presenters sharing solutions and services that bridge the challenges faced by farmers. The specific presentation include, CropWatch cloud of agronomic information ownership where cloud-based services are offered to developing countries, and includes also a suite of applications that allows exploration and analysis of crop information. Another interesting presentation was entitled, Agriculture products traceability management based on IOT, which outlined the various aspects of a dynamic food traceability management system and how artificial intelligence is being used – a poultry product traceability platform was explained.

Why not visit the presentation archive for more information.