Big data revolutionising agriculture to combat world hunger
“Big Data has the potential to push the limits of what is possible and to transform the media of agricultural life in developing countries,” said Brian King, CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture Coordinator.
“The use of analytical technology for research has made it possible for us to improve the recommendations of extension agents. Technologies such as mobile telephones or social networks make it possible for us to interact more every day, even with very rural producers, in ways that were simply not possible even five years ago,” explained Brian King, leader of CGIAR’s Big Data Platform.
The proliferation of new technologies, combined with the digital transformation of economies and societies in recent years, has opened the agriculture sector to new opportunities. In this context, the emergence of CGIAR’s Platform for Big Data in Agriculture, which aims to positively transform agricultural research, is helping to generate powerful data management innovations that can revolutionize agriculture in developing countries and defeat world hunger.
To achieve this, the Big Data Platform functions as a cross-cutting program for all the research centers of the CGIAR System that work in a collaborative manner with the agriculture sector to incentivize the management of data and to obtain results.
The vision of the platform is to continuously improve the use of tools for collection and diffusion of data, digitally transforming the CGIAR and, ultimately the agriculture sector. This evolution will enable new ways in which the research projects can contribute to the reduction of hunger and poverty, especially among the most vulnerable farmers.
Sylvia Pineda
Cali, Colombia
This article’s original version is posted on the CIAT blog.
Translation by José Antonio Arana.
