Unlocking Data Sharing in Agriculture

Digitised data can be a key enabler in addressing multiple challenges in agriculture with benefits for different stakeholders. To meet food security in times characterised by increasing impacts of climate change on agriculture and supply chain disruptions due to geopolitical tensions, data-driven solutions are being utilised increasingly to optimise the use of inputs, increasing production and productivity, and improving access to finance while reducing uncertainties and risks.

Today, however, as the focus on data for agriculture has increased, so have the challenges in the data ecosystem. For instance, there is extensive duplication in data collection, management, and analysis efforts leading to wastage of critical resources and fragmentation of data ecosystems. Similarly, while several disjoint data pools exist, aggregation of data is constrained because of limited standardisation and interoperability. From farmers’ perspective, repeated requests for data are leading to fatigue and a decreasing willingness to engage with digital agriculture service providers.

On the contrary, data-sharing, which can be defined as a scenario where two or more value chain actors share data amongst themselves under a set of binding principles and agreements, can help internalise leakages and orchestrate the agricultural data ecosystem.

With this context, IDH and several partners organised a learning event and several expert consultations on data sharing in agriculture for smallholder farmers. This report synthesises the learnings from the event and takes first steps to decipher action points to promote data sharing in agriculture in a farmer-centric manner.

The report focuses on:

• Incentives for data-sharing in agriculture
• Current scenario of data sharing ecosystem in agriculture
• Building blocks of data sharing
• Learnings from practical use-cases of data sharing
• Recommendations to scale data sharing for agriculture and smallholder farming