A new term, 'e-Agriculture' refers to an emerging field that focuses on the use of ICTs to improve agriculture and to enhance rural development. This involves ingenious ways of conceptualising, designing, developing and applying modern information and communication technologies in the rural arena with a focus on agriculture.
The World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) identified e-agriculture as one of the main action lines. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) has been assigned the responsibility of organising activities related to the Geneva Plan of Action's action line under C.7 ICT Applications
(http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/
official/poa.html)on e-Agriculture. A multi-stakeholder working group was set up in 2006 to guide efforts in this direction. Some of the key partners in this multi-stakeholder initiatives are CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research), CTA (Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation), FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), GFAR (Global Forum on Agricultural Research), GKP (Global Knowledge Partnership), IICD (International Institute for Communication and Development), UNDESA (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs), GAID (Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies and Development), IAALD (International Association of Agricultural Information Specialists), NAL (National Agricultural Library), IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development) and the World Bank.
In September 2007, the e-Agriculture Community of Expertise was officially launched as a global initiative to enhance sustainable agricultural development and Food Security by improving the use of ICT in the sector. The e-Agriculture community's activities are structured in three components: a web-based collaboration space (the www.e-agriculture.org platform); face-to-face events; and in-country interventions.
The overall aim of the e-Agriculture Community of Expertise is to enable members to exchange knowledge related to e-agriculture, and to ensure that the knowledge created is effectively shared and used worldwide. The Community includes policy makers, rural service providers, development practitioners, farmers, researchers, information and communication specialists and others involved in agriculture and rural development. Currently, there are over 4,000 Community members from over 145 countries who participate daily on the platform, exchanging opinions, experiences, good practices, lessons learned, resources, news, events, and leading and participating in virtual forums.
The online platform enables the community to exchange opinions, experiences, good practices and resources to ensure that the knowledge hence created is effectively shared and used globally. e-Agriculture.org website contains following sections:
Knowledge Resources
e-Agriculture.org includes a collection of resources submitted by its partners and community members from around the world. These resources are in the form of case-studies and reports on e-Agriculture, policy guidelines on agriculture developed by various stakeholders and other learning resources. All resources are built by community members for community members. Some of the key resources are:
Knowledge Base
In this section, community members submit their experiences and their outcomes in the form of case studies and reports with relevant ICT statistics. The section covers the examples of government e-Agriculture programmes and policies. Members can search for documents, statistics and other files through a cross-referenced search engine on the page.
Guidelines for Policy and Practice:
This section covers policies and guidelines developed by different organisations and policymakers. Currently, the section includes recommendations from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), and the UK Department for International Development's (DfID) Bridging the Rural Digital Divide Programme and IICD's 2006 ICTs for Agricultural Livelihoods publication.
e-Learning Resources
This section carries links to various e-Learning resources that would be helpful for the e-Agriculture community. The courses are designed to teach skills relevant to different areas of e-Agriculture. Currently, this section contains the following resources:
-
Information Management Resource Kit (IMARK)
-
ItrainOnline Multimedia Training Kit
-
CGIAR Online Learning Resources Centre
-
The Global Development Learning Network (GDLN)
e-Agriculture.org Glossary
This is a compendium of e-Agriculture related terms with their meanings. Users can see either the complete list of words or can browse the glossary through the list of alphabets. As in the other sections, users are welcome to suggest the inclusion of new terms.
e-Agriculture.org Resources
e-Agriculture.org has also developed its own resource section, in which it covers various surveys and reports, presentations and Forum summaries developed on e-Agriculture.org. The e-Agriculture resources comprise mainly of Surveys and Reports, Presentations and Forum Summaries. Following a link on this page takes the user to a page titled, 'e-Agriculture related Podcasts', the content here ranges from personal interviews to coverage of international events and global discussions on ICTs role in Agriculture and Rural Development.
e-Agriculture.org Forum
In order to enhance sustainable agricultural development and food security with the use of information, communication, and associated technologies, e-agriculture.org hosts online forum to interact with experts and specialists on the different topics.
Between 10-28 March 2008, e-Agriculture.org hosted a special online forum on the Role of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) in collaboration with Katalyst, FAO and Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP). In the online forum titled 'Making e-Agriculture Work through Public Private Partnership (PPP) in Asia', e-Agriculture.org explored the areas:
-
The scope of Public Private Partner-ships to implement e-Agriculture successfully
-
Understanding the major & common constraints in PPP based on past experiences and current practices
-
Suggestions and solutions to overcome the challenges and focus on bringing practical solutions
-
The roles of stakeholders: government, private sector, and others
This Forum was a lead up to the eAgriculture India 2008 Conference held in New Delhi, India which was organised by CSDMS, publisher of i4d magazine. The outcome was reported to the World Summit on the Information Society Follow-up Action meetings held in May 2008 as well as discussed and further expanded at the IAALD-AFITA-WCCA World Congress in August 2008.
Earlier forums covered topics such as the CGIAR led improving access to agricultural research information and future forums are being planned on issues including mobile telephony and other important topics.
e-Agriculture Communities
The e-Agriculture platform connects community members to regional and topical sub-communities and allows community members to participate in the forum and check out the action groups. Anyone can become a member of the website/community by filling out a simple form at:
http://www.e-agriculture.org/regform.html
Global Examples
Inline with the interactive and participatory nature of the website, the e-Agriculture community includes volunteers who update a list of interesting items that can be shared online via social bookmarking. This bookmarking is done in the Delicious account 'e_agriculture'. The list of bookmarks is tagged for easy reference. With several hundred bookmarks now tagged anyone can review it for new and interesting information on the Internet. The e-Agriculture platform shows a 'tag cloud' of the most poplar tags at any given time. Currently, the e-agriculture.org contains following examples at the top of its list:
News/Events
The sections offers information on upcoming events related to e-Agriculture and news from around the world about items of interest to the community. The calendar sub-section lists, at a glance the upcoming conferences, seminars, etc.
Use of web2.0 tools Podcast
The website contains podcasts of interviews and conferences which can be downloaded by the members.
Social bookmarking
The e-Agriculture.org uses del.icio.us, social bookmarking tool for sharing useful or interesting links with other friends. All online resources have been tagged on the del.icio.us social bookmarking site with the tag 'e_agriculture'. For users who are not familiar with Social bookmarking, e-Agriculture.org also gives tips about how to use del.icio.us.
Content-sharing via video
YouTube: The e-Agriculture.org channel on YouTube, a free online web2.0 tool to share video content virtually, http://www.youtube.com/eagriculture, contains videos demonstrating the use of information and communications technologies to facilitate and share knowledge on agriculture and rural development.
Digital Green: e-Agriculture.org has also tied up with Microsoft Research for their project called Digital Green. Digital Green is an agricultural training and advisory system that seeks to help rural farmers by disseminating targeted information through digital videos. So far, the Digital Green's Video Repository has 120 downloadable videos.
Photo sharing: e-Agriculture.org uses Flickr, an online image and video hosting website to share images related to agricultural innovations, best practices and information dissemination
Conclusion
The e-Agriculture.org is a platform for the e-Agriculture community, a virtual meeting and sharing place, where users can share experiences, opinions and good practices related to agriculture. The online platform includes policymakers, rural service providers, development practitioners, farmers, researchers and ICT specialists. The website uses several web2.0 tools to provide interactive, up to date and relevant information to the community. To increase its reach, the website is available not just in English, but also in French and Spanish languages. The availability of the wealth of information in major languages and the use of web2.0 tools have jointly created a platform that can take the lead in the information revolution eventually benefitting agriculture and rural development. Being a community-driven initiative, much of this depends on the existing and future members of this website to carry forward the revolution and to bring together like-minded and enterprising people from around the world to work together. 
Compiled by Ritu Srivastava (ritu@csdms.in) and Subir Dey (subir@csdms.in)
