Armen Harutyunyan: We prioritize digitalization of agriculture

Armen Harutyunyan, Director of the Department of Agro-Industrial Policy of the Eurasian Economic Commission, spoke to the organizers of the 34th session of the FAO Regional Conference for Europe (ERC34).

We have had very successful cooperation with our fellow counterparts in FAO, cooperation between the Eurasian Economic Union and FAO. We have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with an Action plan, which we intend to update this year.

So far we've done a lot of work, especially targeting sustainable agriculture development. We have done excellent work together by publishing a report on the development of the planned production in the Member states of the Eurasian Economic Union, which included also lots of measures targeted on increasing efficiency, optimizing costs.

With colleagues at FAO, we've been discussing also a lot the digitalization of agriculture agenda. You know that this topic has become very popular, especially when different sectors of the economy started to introduce digitalization and technologies in agriculture.

We're also looking forward to including the new Action plan, and target it on further digitalization and technologies in the agriculture, keeping in mind that whatever we do, we also have to put a lot of emphasis on sustainability of agriculture.

Challenges that different Member States of the Eurasian Economic Union actually have a different structure of agriculture and some of the cases it could be very large production facilities, in other parts it could be subsistence farmers, so the solutions are very much different.

So what we're trying to do, we're trying to bring together the expertise of FAO, the private sector engagement, especially the industrial agriculture.

And by means of mobilizing knowledge and resources, we're targeting them towards development of sustainable small agriculture as well. Another important challenge that we see at the moment, I would say is the climate change.

At the Commission and together with the partners at FAO, we're trying to target policies on the sustainable agriculture development.

Those are a few areas where we are working together and I think those directions will be included in the new agendas you mentioned, how to find the best solution to the challenges that we're facing.

The regional conference is a good platform to meet people, to meet colleagues right in the morning, when there are very interesting discussions with the Director of the digital unit at FAO for example and with 3rd about directions that we can include in our for future work as well.

We're working through our regional office as our main counterparts and it's important to channel this information to the HQ to bring in the best expertise.

First, I would say it's a platform to meet people, to meet new specialists and experts.

In new directions that are important for us and of course the agenda, a lot of interesting stuff happening in the world and I think it's a good chance to bring that new directions into our action plan as well.

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The full recording of the interview is posted here: https://youtu.be/wVT9chUyCOQ