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February 26, 2008 : Tech for Food symposhium
The 2008 Tech for Food forum at the Paris Agriculture Show on February 26 was an occasion for actors from the global North and South to discuss the use of ICTs (information and communication technologies) in agriculture in developing countries.
The working session in the morning was devoted to market information systems (MIS). A brief overview of the subject by Eric Pasquati (FARM Foundation) was followed by a presentation of the platform Infoshare by Alexandra Laurent (UNCTAD) and a presentation of TradeNet by Patrice Annequin (IFDC). Participants were asked to address four points related to the prospects of MIS :
partnerships accessibility and dissemination of information information exchanged and services offered adapting MIS to local socio-cultural realities
The conclusions reached can be summarised as follows :
- The prospects for technological and social appropriation of MIS depend entirely on how well technological tools and methodologies are adapted to the realities of the potential user communities.
- There are three aspects to a long term deployment of MIS :
the technological tools themselves, their adaptation to local realities and the combination of new technologies with traditional ones to fill in the infrastructure gap in rural areas of developing countries
the human aspect, including the use of established networks, and especially agricultural professional organisations, for the dissemination of information
the development of skills through training and supervising in order to build the capabilities of end users to interpret information generated by these systems.
- These technologies have a tremendous capacity to mobilise actors and can have strong impacts on social dynamics. This calls for vigilance against the development of systems of social exclusion as the technology is deployed throughout the community. These technologies should be used as means of social inclusion, a goal that needs to be reiterated and kept foremost in mind.
The morning program of the Tech for Food forum also included two workshops : innovative technologies in the service of water management ; and space-based techniques for serving developing countries.
The afternoon program was comprised of four presentations followed by discussion :
Olivier Longué (Action Against Hunger, Spain) described a project that uses PDAs to bolster the reliability, rapidity, and precision of nutritional diagnoses of the situation of populations in Lesotho ; Edgardo Herbosa (b2bPriceNow) presented his project of virtual markets in the Philippines that enables farmers to bypass banking services ; Norbert Niedhauser (International Center for Tropical Agriculture) presented an alliance project of crop diversification in Colombia which has enabled small coffee growers to diversify their production through networking among actors ; Leon Van Mullekom (BASF) discussed a BASF project on tracing residues in grapes via the Internet, PDAs and cell phones for greater reactivity to the market.
The closing event of the Forum was the signing of a partnership agreement between the not-for-profit organisation Territories of Tomorrow (represented by André Loechel), the Europe-Afrique Institute (Ibrahim Key) and representatives of the Senegalese government for developing the digitisation of civil records in Senegal.
For further information : www.techforfood.com
