Nobel prize winner Michael Kremer at Africa-Americas Ministerial Summit: The path for rural areas to overcome poverty is through digital agriculture

San Jose, 28 July 2022 (IICA) – Family farmers in Africa and the Americas can obtain fast, effective solutions to their most serious problems through digital agriculture, using smartphones as a tool for knowledge transfer.

This was the key message of Michael Kremer, who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2019, to the ministers, deputy ministers, and senior officials of Agriculture, Environment and Science and Technology of 40 countries at the first “Africa-Americas Summit on Agricultural and Food Systems”, held in Costa Rica.

Kremer was the keynote speaker at the session entitled “Opportunities in Digital Agriculture”, in which Limber Cruz, Minister of Agriculture of the Dominican Republic; Davis Marapira of Zimbabwe; and Amery Browne, Minister of Foreign Affairs for Trinidad and Tobago, also participated. Mohammed Silim Nahdy, Executive Director of the African Forum for Agricultural Advisory Services (AFAAS), also took part in the roundtable discussion.

“Often, farmers live in remote areas and lack information about new technologies. But digital agriculture has the potential to promote mass access to information by rural populations, who can quickly incorporate the new knowledge into their daily tasks with huge potential benefits, as has already been demonstrated in different countries”, explained Kremer, who is internationally renowned for his studies on alleviating global poverty and is IICA Goodwill Ambassador for Sustainable Development.

“Once the system of digital agriculture has been set in motion, the cost of adding new members is extremely low, so it is a focus that can expand rapidly”, explained the expert, who used Ethiopia as an example, where farmers use an interactive voice response system to receive personalized, automated messages with useful weather-related information to help manage their crops.

Kremer also referred to India and its program to analyze soil chemistry and health to provide smallholders with basic information on improving specific agricultural practices based on the conditions specific to each area. Kenya is another country that sends useful information to farmers to help determine when it is best to harvest.

Kremer believes that digital agriculture is an example of innovation that offers solutions to the challenges of climate change, which are affecting agricultural productivity in many developing countries. The expert added that governments must be mindful of this reality.

Kremer is co-founder of Precision Development (PxD), an organization that introduced digital agriculture services to family farmers in Asia and Africa to provide technical assistance and rural extension, both key for the weakest link in the agriculture sector to improve yield and increase income.

PxD has partnered with IICA to bring digital extension services that allow for low-cost, high-impact, two-way communication capable of empowering farmers in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, in a joint effort to provide small-scale farmers with tools to produce more and better foods in a framework of sustainability and efficient use of natural resources.

Brazil is the first country to benefit from this initiative, with an initial focus on providing remote assistance to thousands of smallholders in the country’s northeastern region who raise ovine and caprine animals and cultivate corn and beans.

“There is growing evidence that family farmers can reduce their fertilizer spend if they have the information they need to carry out targeted nutrient management. Soil-related audio content is easy to make and easy to understand”, affirmed Kremer, who is also a professor at the University of Chicago.

In the current scenario of crises overlapped with the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Eastern Europe and the impact of climate change, Kremer believes that much can be done if more farmers have access to connectivity and smartphones.

“We have more opportunities to integrate digital agriculture with other services. Digital agricultural extension can integrate with improved weather forecasting services that can help farmers to make important decisions about when to plant, when to harvest and even what to plant”, stated Kremer.

“As weather patterns change as a result of climate change, digitalization can help farmers to adapt and to share information”, he added.

Dominican minister Limber Cruz expressed that “those of us responsible for implementing public policies for historically disadvantaged populations face enormous challenges that cannot be overlooked. It is essential to democratize access to information technologies and knowledge so that their benefits reach the hands of our real producers. This implies access to broadband in rural territories, as well as a profound transformation in knowledge management processes that would allow access to research and knowledge through a user-friendly communication process”.

Cruz regrets that “this conversation was not had before”, adding that, “the future will depend on how we execute everything we have discussed in order to monitor, evaluate and take seriously the opportunities that are at our disposal to move forward with digital agriculture, meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and, in turn, help those who lack access to food on a daily basis”.

In turn, Mohammed Silim Nahdy spotlighted the low productivity of the agriculture sector in Africa. “Almost 70% of inhabitants live off of and depend on agriculture and almost 60% of the land is arable. 70% of the population is young and, as such, digitization is a good opportunity to attract them to farming”, he commented.

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Institutional Communication Division

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