The State of Food and Agriculture 2022: Leveraging Automation to Transform Agrifood Systems
Agricultural automation, which includes anything from tractors to artificial intelligence, can play an important role in making food production more efficient and more environmentally friendly, reports Krishat Jagan. However, its uneven adoption can also deepen inequalities, especially if it remains inaccessible to small-scale producers and other marginalized groups, such as youth and women.
The 2022 edition of The State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA), one of the flagship reports produced each year by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), looks at how automation in our agrifood systems can contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and offers recommendations to policy makers on how to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks.
From hire-a-tractor services in Ghana to shrimp boxes that use machine learning and robotics in Mexico, the report looks at 27 case studies from all over the world, representing technologies at different stages of readiness and appropriate to agricultural producers of different scales and levels of income.
It investigates the drivers of these technologies and identifies several barriers preventing its adoption, particularly by small-scale producers. Based on this analysis, the publication suggests policies to ensure that agricultural automation is inclusive and contributes to sustainable and resilient agrifood systems.
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Finally, the report also looks at one of the most common concerns about automation – that it creates unemployment – and concludes that such fears are not borne out by historical realities.
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