The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a United Nations agency focused on rural development, and Grow Asia, a regional multi-stakeholder agriculture platform, said digital delivery systems have yet to reach the scale needed to serve enough farmers across the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a ten-member regional bloc where agriculture remains a major source of livelihoods.

Their assessment was published in the report “Accelerating Smallholder Digital Adoption at Scale in ASEAN: Strategic Pathways,” launched at the 26th Meeting of the ASEAN Ministers on Agriculture and Forestry Plus Three — the forum that convenes the bloc’s agriculture ministers alongside their counterparts from China, Japan, and South Korea. According to the report, more programs are needed to reach food producers who use digital tools.

“This report confirms what our field-level teams have been telling us: the solutions exist, but they are not consistently reaching the farmers and businesses who need them most,” Grow Asia Executive Director Beverley Postma said.

The report is one of the outputs of the Smallholder Economic Empowerment through Digital Solutions project, implemented by Grow Asia and IFAD. Funding also came from South Korea’s Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.

The study underlying the report surveyed 824 respondents across eight of ASEAN’s ten member countries. Most of them use digital tools for farming advisories, digital payments, and digital marketplaces — the categories that shape how farmers obtain guidance, move money, and reach buyers.

IFAD and Grow Asia said the challenge is not a “shortage of technology” but rather an “underdeveloped delivery system.” Problem areas within that system include farmers’ economic, behavioral, social, and operational conditions, which can affect their use of digital tools; the feasibility of digital tools in reaching farmers; and the overall capacity of institutions, policies, and the public and private sectors to make these digital systems effective.

The report identifies priority action areas including investing in digital and data infrastructure, strengthening cooperatives, ensuring inclusive adoption through financing and risk-sharing systems, and institutionalizing public-private-philanthropy partnerships. Launching the findings at the ministerial meeting puts those recommendations in front of the region’s agriculture policymakers; the next signal to watch is how governments and project partners act on the priorities, and what further outputs follow from the project behind the report.

Source: BusinessWorld — Maria Mikaela H. Tormon