Increasing sustainability of food production and ensuring human health through agriculture digitalization

Abstract

Ensuring safe food for a growing population is a challenge for agriculture. The current systems of intensive agriculture are based on important allocations of factors of production per unit area, like chemical fertilizers and pesticides, allocated in order to stimulate production. In doing so, food security is ensured, by obtaining high yields per hectare, but chemical residues may remain in food and human health is jeopardised. The aim of this research is to identify the role of digitalization in agriculture in balancing the binomial food security-organic farming, starting from the premise that smart agriculture has a significantly lower negative impact on the environment and human health compared to the conventional agricultural system. The relevance of research lies in raising awareness of the importance of smart agriculture in providing agricultural products obtained in accordance with the principles of sustainable development and moreover integrating it into policies and actions at all levels: individual, local, national and global.

Valorization of Agropastoral Products and by-Products. Case of the Wilaya of Nâama (Western Algeria)

“…Ensuring food security for a population is a challenge for agriculture. Intensive farming systems rely on the massive use of inputs such as chemical fertilizers and pesticides, in order to stimulate production by achieving high yields but threatening human health is threatened (Stoian et al 2022). Through our survey, we noticed that more than 67% of the farmland by agro-pastoralists does not benefit from livestock manure or industrial fertilizers, and only 30% of agro-pastoralists use phytosanitary substances, the remaining 70% have a potential for the «organic» product from natural agricultural practices that do not use any chemical or industrial substances.…”