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Policy briefThe role of digital technologies in livestock traceability and trade
FAO Trade Policy Briefs No. 36 Trade & Agriculture Innovation
2020Also available in:
No results found.This policy brief provides an overview on the role of digital technologies in optimizing traceability in trade for animals and animal products. It highlights the ways in which digital technologies can the enhance performance for monitoring and controlling animal disease, managing food safety and fraud risks, complying with animal production and food standards, facilitating trade and raising consumer awareness. -
Book (stand-alone)Digital technology and agricultural markets
Background paper for The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets (SOCO) 2020
2020Also available in:
No results found.Digital technologies have a high potential to enable further development of the agricultural sector, significantly reshape food value chains (FVCs), and greatly contribute towards more productive, resilient and transparent food systems. This paper provides a non-technical overview of digital technologies that have a high potential to revolutionize the agriculture and food industry, and contribute towards inclusion of small farmers into FVCs. The particular focus is on digital platforms providing e-commerce services and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), such as blockchain, as they mutually enable more efficient and more inclusive local and global agricultural markets by tackling their contribution to reducing information asymmetries, transaction costs, and providing financial inclusion of actors along FVCs. Various examples indicate that digital technologies represent great potential benefits for small farmers including increased efficiency of production, direct access to market, inclusion in global value chains (GVCs), and access to finance and insurance services. The further potential of digital technologies, especially blockchain, could change existing linear food value chain models by providing more transparency and trust between the supply chain actors. Finally, by using digital technologies, governments can provide more efficient public services. Overall, the real impact of digital technologies on the agriculture and food industry will be more evident in the years to come when they become widely accepted by all involved actors, and their usage reaches a critical scale. The role of governments will be significant in enabling adequate environments for innovations and further technological development. -
ArticleA method to prioritize the surveillance of chemicals in food commodities to access international market and its application to four countries in Sub-Saharan Africa 2020
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No results found.The purpose of this study was to propose an approach to predict the distribution of chemicals in food in developing countries to assess consumer risk and access to the international market with a limited number of laboratory analyses. The first step consists of identifying the GEMS/Food Contaminants database and the chemical/food combination relevant for a particular country. The identification of critical chemical/food combination should be used to prioritize the analysis to be performed in a total diet study (TDS). The second step consists of modeling a distribution model based on the mean concentration generated from TDS associated with the variability observed in a larger dataset consisting of individual food contamination data from the GEMS food database. The simulated distributions may provide information regarding how to establish food safety standards and to assess the potential for accessing international market in the context of a value chain. This method is illustrated by case studies from the recent Regional TDS (RTDS) conducted in Sub Saharan Africa. We concluded that further work is needed to gain experience and to fully validate this approach. However, organized data sharing and developing harmonized methods for data analysis are key roles for international organizations, such as FAO, WHO, and WTO. Finally, it is important to remember that such a data-driven approach still requires significant investments in terms of human resources and analytical capacity.
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