Dear All,
I would like to share my idea with you. With my more than 25 years working experience on agricultural research and development, my concept for food secure world is:
For the achievement pf SDG 2: “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture” by 2030 we must prioritize the need of the smallholder farmer as agriculture in the developing countries mainly undertaken by smallholder farmers who constitute over two-thirds of the global poor, food insecure and most vulnerable population. For this purpose, we need to insure the right inputs in right time, real time advisory services and ensure the selling price of the farm products.
These can be achievable if we can connect directly farmers with the input dealer, advisor and consumer in a loop using ICT tools such as mobile APP. Currently, these linkage are broken, passes through many intermediaries and non-transparent. Consequently, smallholder farmers are not using right input, have lower yield and lower selling price while the consumer has less trust of food safety what they buy from market. If we want to create a responsible safe food system, we must create direct link between consumer and producer that will insure the higher return for the smallholder farmers.
Thank you.
Homestead gardening is an ancient practice to the farm families of Bangladesh, where the women used to grow vegetables or fruits using their own seeds. The quantity of the production as well as its contribution to family nutrition varied largely from farmer to farmer depending on the availability of land areas as well as land type. Rural farmers have little access to information and advisory services for decision making in real time. Creating an innovation platform by linking the different actors of production system including farmers, extension personnel, researcher, input dealers etc. through a simplified mobile app in local language will help farmers in decision making in real time for sustainable agriculture with improved nutrition security.
Dr. Md. Kamrul Islam
In my country, Bangladesh, food usually wasted when it is rotten. Food rotting initiates from cultivation practices. Harvesting of immature or over mature crops, unavailability of food processing centers at rural areas, under developed marketing system are most important factors responsible for food rotting followed by food waste. Thus, according to me, food waste prevention policy, strategy and guidelines should consider the food production system.