AgriResilience

The Opportunity

Recent breakthroughs in digital technology are poised to drive a transformation of food systems. AgriResilience will harness these innovations to accelerate progress by providing access to near real-time information that enable actions to improve food security and create opportunities for smallholder farm business development.

The Challenge

For agriculture to meet growing food and nutrition requirements it must produce more on a diminishing land resource that is experiencing climate change marked by extremes, resulting in increased drought, floods, pests, and disease. Meanwhile smallholder farmers, about two thirds of the developing world, are stewards of significant land areas. Smallholder farm practices can sustain resource lands while helping mitigate climate through climate smart action. But to make progress farmers first need to manage risks to ensure economic stability. In the absence of economic stability, smallholder’s survival is essentially season to season, with little room to make the investments needed to change the status quo.

The Response

AgriResilience will transform risk management by closing the digital divide, leveraging proven agricultural monitoring technologies and open data to provide early warning, risk assessment, and response information. The transition will:

• Support finance measures, including low-cost input insurance products, benefitting farmers, and providing a more stable risk environment for Agri-finance and service expansion

• Bundling finance services with information to inform on-farm decisions in response to pests, disease, and weather-related risk, resulting in a reduction of the yield gap

• Improve crop monitoring services to provide timely local crop specific advisories informed by seasonal climate and production forecasts

• Enable more effective disaster response at the national and international level, reducing the disruptive impact of large scale disasters (typhoon, drought, etc) by more effective response at national and international levels
  

The Actions

AgriResilience will build on proven, cost-effective, ag-finance, early warning, and crop monitoring initiatives by scaling up existing programs to the national level in multiple African countries. Specific actions include:

1. Expand the low-cost input insurance products by scaling up proven crop surveillance information to increase the economic resilience of smallholders and the agricultural input sector

2. Scale-up proven GEOGLAM crop monitoring activities at national level to support national agricultural early warning systems and seasonal forecasts that inform policies and programs supporting smallholder farmers, and influence farm management

View the GEOGLAM Crop Monitor here

Project Impact

AgriResilience will increase smallholder farmer resilience, opening the door to investments to reduce the yield gap and foster climate smart practices that improve the land resource, increase food production, and help mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Project timeline

2021: Q4 Detailed Project Planning

2022: Country Selection and Establish National Partner Networks

Crop Monitoring Information Systems and Products:

• Global Crop Monitors

• Incorporate Seasonal Forecasts and Crop Specific Metrics

• Develop Historical Data (Climate and EO)

• Develop Anomaly Thresholds

Co-Develop Enhanced National Crop Monitoring Systems

2023-2024: Operational Crop Monitoring

Implement Input Insurance Pilots

Develop Localized Near-Real-Time Farming Advisories and Climate Smart Action Guidelines

2025-2026: Operational Crop Monitoring

Scale-up Input Insurance Pilots to National Scale and Hand-off for Sustained Operations