Background

Digital agriculture has the potential in opening new opportunities to agri-food producers, including micro, small and medium enterprises, and possible access to regional and global markets. Digitalization with artificial intelligence and robots are supposed to increase the efficiency massively in production, thereby reducing the consumption of resources. Technology development needs to merge into the knowledge-based digital bio-economy to set economic growth on a sustainable development path.

Recent catastrophic event by the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected the distribution of agriculture and food products. The limitation of logistics and transportation services due to the restricted movement within and between countries has disrupted agri-food supply chain. For instance, the agri-food producers faced difficulty in selling agricultural products, resulting in the issue of dumping and disposal of the products, during the early phase of COVID-19. Digital agri-food system ensures undisrupted food supply chains since the technology assists the agri-food producers to improve the efficiency of their current production and marketing system.

The workshop is aligned with FFTC Strategic Action Plan 2021-2024 on enhancing food value chain and consumer-oriented production. Recognizing the importance in ensuring sustainable food distribution for the growing world population, efforts must be put in place in creating digital bio-economy by applying e-commerce, mobile technology, internet of things (IoT), big data analytics, automation, artificial intelligence, digital service delivery system to the target groups. In this sense, this workshop aims to attract the attention of policymakers, researchers, industry players, agri-food producers, to foster the digital application as a strategy to enhance food value chain, and its contribution to spur economic growth, as well as improve the quality of life. The linkages between companies, research institutions, government and consumers are required to ensure mutual learning and knowledge development to explore potential paths of the sustainability transformation. The workshop is proposed as an online platform due to the current pandemic situation, but local participants will have an on-site workshop depending on the COVID situation.