FAO Deputy Director-General statement at ECOSOC Coordination Segment

Speeches

FAO Deputy Director-General statement at ECOSOC Coordination Segment

FAO statement

01/02/2023

Coordination Segment of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Panel discussion on "Digital transformation for health and food security"

Beth Bechdol, Deputy Director-General
Food and Agriculture Organization

Excellencies, Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen,

We are indeed halfway to 2030 and, as we say in food and agriculture, we have seven seasons left before we reach that deadline, but unfortunately the distance to reach many of the Sustainable Development Goals - in particular SGD2 on Zero Hunger - is growing wider each year.

As we know, urgent action is needed to get us back on track.

Data, digitalization and innovation are key accelerators for this, and are core to the work of FAO.

Digital technologies, in particular, can have a transformational effect on our economies and societies, and very importantly, on agriculture, on agrifood systems, health systems, and rural development.

By transformation, I mean that it has a cumulative effect - that it can have a greater impact when you bring digital technologies into agrifood systems to play a key role in improving food security.

Take, for example, precision agriculture and all of its related innovations - sensors, satellite technologies, data and digital analytics. All of this, taken together now as a part of an innovation and data-driven revolution in food and agriculture helps farmers optimize crop yields, improve their water use, better manage their fertilizer and other inputs uses, ultimately producing more with fewer inputs and less environmental impact.

Digital tools and big data can improve availability and accessibility to knowledge and information to support more targeted and transformative policy interventions in agrifood systems.

Ultimately, digitalization can "democratize" or level the playing field in a have and have-not world of agriculture.

It can connect farmers to markets and improve their access to loans, to credit, to insurance, and other types of finance - and it is also all-inclusive. But there is a huge risk if and when this digital transformation is not accessible to all.

The lack of access to digital technologies can only serve to increase already existing gaps, and actually could work against our collective efforts to leave no one behind.

We need to ensure that small-scale and family farmers and rural communities have access to technologies that are relevant and applicable to their specific contexts.

This is a priority for us at FAO, and we act on it in different ways, responding to oftentimes the needs that are identified by and with countries.

Let me briefly touch on three initiatives, that I think demonstrate this approach to concrete action.

Our 1000 Digital Villages Initiative fosters local and community-led development to accelerate the digital transformation of rural areas. This means helping farmers improve their productivity in small, rural villages through ICT and relevant digital solutions. It also helps improve farmers' access to different types of services, whether they be financial services, social protection, providing even employment opportunities and so on.

We are also seeing tremendous results from our Hand-in-Hand Initiative.

This is a unique business model that provides for matchmaking investments with development opportunities in countries.

It starts with the development of a very complex, very sophisticated geospatial, biophysical and socio-economic dataset, for over 50 countries around the world that are in need of the most critical advancements in agricultural production.

Then using advanced analytics, we are able to support national governments, to identify where there is overproduction, underproduction, best suitability from soil mapping, agronomic capacity, to allow national governments to truly, with the power of data and digital tools, identify the best approaches for long-term agricultural farming plans.

Once these plans are adopted, then FAO enters into a very different role, which is bringing the private sector and multilateral development banks to target agricultural investments most precisely - where it is needed most and where it will have the greatest impact.

We are also upgrading and digitalizing our very successful Farmer Field Schools structure to have a greater reach.

This is a long-standing extension and advisory initiative led by FAO for over 30 years in over 100 countries. It has long been a delivery tool, an information channel, that is provided to farmers, previously focused on best practices for insect control, for agronomic decisions, for seed selection, and other production-oriented decision making.

In today's world, it is time to make sure that we train farmers on all types of digital applications, data-driven decision-making tools, and to also ensure in this modernization that FAO steps in further to ensure that we are delivering this knowledge using the most advanced digital literacy tools and training methods, to again, ensure that the digital divide does not continue to widen.

To close, let me reiterate that digital transformation is indeed a driving force of the future, and it will lead us towards, ultimately, the transformation of agrifood systems.

Because of this, it is an important element of national food systems transformation pathways, which are very important to the follow-up of the Food Systems Summit held two years ago and will be critical to the Stocktaking Moment, taking place in July later this year.

This Stocktaking will be an opportunity to collectively review progress, share early success stories in food systems transformation and help chart the road ahead.

And, it will be a milestone towards the SDG Summit next September.

To conclude, FAO looks forward to working together with Members, with national governments, our UN and all other partners to ultimately realize the potential of digitalization in transforming agrifood systems.

Thank you.