End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture. This
is an extract from Finextra's The Future of ESGTech 2022 report.
Focus Target 2.3: By 2030, double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers, in particular women, indigenous peoples, family farmers, pastoralists and fishers, including through secure and equal access to land, other productive
resources and inputs, knowledge, financial services, markets and opportunities for value addition and non-farm employment.
In the same way that open data can reinforce the eradication of poverty, data that is freely available and can support the application of analytics can help end hunger. However, for success, this data will need to be shared in a standardised format and in
a way that the source can be easily traced. There are a few organisations utilising open data initiatives to achieve food security, improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture, but the most cited is Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition
(GODAN).
In a report,
GODAN highlighted that although there is enough food made in the world for everyone, 300 million children die as a result of malnutrition each year. Further, 800 million people go hungry every day, and that is one in every nine people, with the majority
being women and children.
These statistics reiterate the need to double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers, even if it is for these farmers to feed themselves. Also, as a direct result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of people at risk of
hunger is likely to increase from 881 million in 2015 to more than 1.2 billion within the next five years, the GODAN report revealed.
The non-profit’s view is that through open data, solutions can be shaped and decision-making across the agricultural and nutritional value chain can foster innovation, by way of three angles:
- “By making data available and increasing our capacity to analyse it with new technologies such as artificial intelligence, researchers from all horizons can now advance global knowledge at a pace never seen before.
- Sharing data and its underlying knowledge allow best practice to be shared across the global, bringing proven solutions from one region to another.
- Combining ideas and data from previously isolated ‘knowledge silos’, allows producers to develop and implement work methods that combine skills and expertise into a new, higher level of ingenuity, producers, empowerment and efficiency.”
What this shows is that open ESG data and leveraging ESG technology can provide a clear route to sustainable farming, increased yields, and improved nutrition. But where do financial services come in? Using GODAN’s open data solution, fishers can solidify
their financial security with the creation of sustainable fishing methods. By recording their catches, marketing their fish, and opening business accounts with trusted financial institutions, access to credit is now available to them.
ACTION FOR 2022: Instil processes that are data-driven to establish a long-term, sustainable food strategy.