Sixteen million family farmers live and work in rural areas of our Latin America and the Caribbean. They and their families constitute the backbone of agriculture that guarantees food and nutritional security in the region.
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Despite this key role, most of these farmers subsist in a framework of poverty, deficit services, with little or no access to credit and far from the attention of public policies that promote the creation of opportunities for social development, progress and work. quality in rural areas.
The pandemic has accentuated the strategic role of family farming and created greater political and social awareness of its importance. But it also imposed new barriers to the access of these farmers to rural extension services, such as the dissemination of technical and health information, which are decisive in improving the production of their crops and animals.
Those effects must be harnessed on the one hand and faced on the other. Awareness must be transformed into action, considering the capacity of the agricultural sector to prop up the reactivation of economies collapsed by the pandemic.
At the same time, extension services must be increasingly associated with available technologies, capable of strengthening family farming, increasing its productivity and generating more income for farmers, in a context of respect for the environment and that considers their condition. vulnerable socio-economic.
The destructive effect of the covid-19 also reached the traditional model of extension and the crisis created by the virus must be addressed by accelerating the use of digital technologies, which offer the opportunity for remote personalized attention at a lower cost than the current system. during decades.
An incipient digital agricultural revolution will benefit small producers, women and young people in rural areas, improving their living conditions
If the agricultural sector can lead the post-pandemic recovery, we must focus on strategies for the dissemination of technology, the expansion of telecommunications infrastructure, and the facilitation of mass access to smartphones.
We can convince governments, companies and other key actors by showing that investing to improve rural connectivity generates returns on an ever-increasing scale, as can be seen in Ethiopia, Kenya and India from examples presented by Michael Kremer, 2019 Nobel Laureate in Economics.
This infrastructure is the basis of an incipient digital agricultural revolution, which will allow access to real-time information for decision-making and much more precise management based on the use of good practices.
This revolution will benefit small producers, women and young people in rural areas, improving their living conditions. Digital agriculture based on the intensive use of technological devices, artificial intelligence and online learning, make the information liable to be programmed and customized according to the needs of each of the small farmers.
It will be necessary to adapt the technology approach and design messages that facilitate understanding, broadening the horizons of those who need and consume information: farmers. For this, the role of technical cooperation is very relevant.
The massive use of technology has been shown to have a practical perspective: it is aimed at solving problems in the field with limited costs. It is then a viable and effective strategy to improve life in rural territories, a matter of survival for our increasingly urban societies.
Manuel Otero is Director General of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA).
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