What's Cooking: Digital Transformation of the Agrifood System

Abstract

A strong food and agriculture system is fundamental to economic growth, poverty reduction, environmental sustainability, and human health. The Agriculture and Food Series is intended to prompt public discussion and inform policies that will deliver higher incomes, reduce hunger, improve sustainability, and generate better health and nutrition from the food we grow and eat. It expands on the former Agriculture and Rural Development series by considering issues from farm to fork, in both rural and urban settings. Titles in this series undergo internal and external review under the management of the World Bank's Agriculture and Food Global Practice.

Rethinking Sustainability Requirements: Drivers, Barriers and Impacts of Digitalisation from the Viewpoint of Experts

“…Economic incentives for technology adoption coming from institutions are also key enablers, paired with educational support by means, e.g., of digital innovation centres, which can facilitate technological uptake. The importance of subsidies and taxation as main enablers was also observed by Barnes et al [2019], and the role of institutions in general is remarked also in a recent book by Schroeder et al [2021] focused on digitalisation in agrifood.…”

“…These favour large business owners, the community and institutions alike. For example, improved control on data about a certain farm, or about the origin of wood, can facilitate assessment by government and thus improve legality, as remarked by other studies [Schroeder et al, 2021]. Finally, from the environmental standpoint, technology facilitates precision and control, thus reducing the human impact on vegetation and animals in the long-term.…”

“…Finally, barriers are also regulatory-institutional, especially in relation to data management. Issues around data ownership were widely discussed also by previous literature focused on smart farming and the agrifood sector in general [Barnes et al, 2018, Regan, 2019, Van der Burg et al, 2019, Fleming et al, 2018, Schroeder et al, 2021, De Beer, 2016. As observed by Van der Burg et al [2019], farm data are not personal data in strict sense, still they are valued so by farmers because farm business and household are traditionally viewed as 'one-and-the-same economic unit'.…”

“…Carbonell [2016] suggests to adopt open data policies, as a way to respect the people's right to access information. Still, Schroeder et al [2021] remarks the need for transparent data policies, in which the usage of data is made clear to farmers, and technology providers are accountable for how they use them.…”

What are the priority research questions for digital agriculture?

“…Others point to the relatively low uptake of precision technologies, particularly the more complex applications (Barnes et al, 2019;Lowenberg-DeBoer and Erickson, 2019;Carolan, 2020;Spati et al, 2021). More fundamentally, the assumptions and "normative desirability and expected benefits" (Fleming et al, 2018, p19) of these technologies, articulated by science and policy (Defra, 2018) and embedded in high level policy and international agency discourse, are being questioned (Poppe et al, 2015;Kuch et al, 2020;Lajoie-O'Malley et al, 2020;Schroeder et al, 2021). Furthermore, it is increasingly understood that digital agriculture is rooted in economic, political, social and ethical relations with a range of issues being raised about data governance (Bronson and Knezevic, 2016;Carbonell, 2016;Capalbo et al, 2017;Rotz et al, 2019) and the threat of reinforcing existing economic, spatial, and social divides (Carolan, 2017a(Carolan, , 2020FAO, 2019).…”