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Feeding The Billions
Feeding The Billions

May 21, 2020

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There are about 400 million smallholding farmers across the globe, producing more than 60% of the world food. One of their primary challenge is loss of crops due to pests and weeds.

Available land for farming continues to shrink with ever growing population. Human society needs to increase food production by an estimated 70% by 2050 to feed an expected population size predicted to be over 9 billion. “Improving crop yield” is the best we can do to feed this population.

Creating a “Human Centric Society” has been Fujitsu’s vision for many years now. As one of the world’s largest ICT Company, Fujitsu continues to develop technology which will help well-being of society and support UN SDGs.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2015 are a set of common goals to be achieved worldwide, including by developed countries, by 2030. Achieving these goals places considerable demand on private-sector enterprises to play an active and useful role through their technology and capacity for innovation. (https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/?menu=1300)

In this sense, the SDGs are one element in an ecosystem aimed at achieving the Fujitsu growth strategy of “connected services”, pointing the way to new business opportunities through ventures that work to resolve social issues. The Fujitsu Group views the SDGs as a global common language and undertakes SDG-related activities as an opportunity for wide-ranging collaboration with other organizations, including international agencies and governments, private companies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). By embracing a multifaceted approach through cooperation with many partners, we can create and maximize social value on an even larger scale.

One of the projects which we feel can be looked at is “Improving Crop Yield through Image Recognition”. This will support SDGs One (No Poverty) and Two (Zero Hunger).

Proposed solution will help these farmers to reduce loss or crop due to pests and weeds by at least 30% to 40%. It will go a long way in helping in feeding the growing world population. By helping the small holder farmers amongst others improve crop yield will help improve their economic conditions. This is in true sense what we call creating a Human Centric Society. It will also help world’s biggest agrochemical companies to improve their products and genetically developed seeds which will result in better yield.

Solution being proposed could work as follows:

· Farmers will look at their crops like tomato, rice, soya bean, corn etc., using their smart phones cameras.

· Proposed solution includes a Mobile App that will use Advanced Image Recognition and Artificial Intelligence to classify the diseases and provide recommendation to cure.

· Data generated by the application will be converted to useful information (weather conditions, season, month, city, country, disease etc.) for agrochemical companies and they will use that information to improve their products continuously.

The widespread distribution of smartphones among crop growers around the world with an expected 5 billion smartphones by 2020 offers the potential of turning the smartphone into a valuable tool.

Advanced Image Recognition combined with huge volume of data sets which can be hosted on cloud with extreme compute power is extremely important to implementing this solution.

The solution aims to address following business challenges

1. Immediate support to farmers against pests, weeds which regularly infect their crops and result in huge loses

2. Improve crop protection products and genetically developed seeds to generate better yield every year

3. Removing language barrier in communicating effectively with farmers in language which they understand

4. Feeding growing population across the world with reduced agricultural land

Currently, infectious diseases reduce the potential yield by an average of 40% with many farmers in the developing world experiencing yield losses as high as 100%.

Conclusion

We (Humans) are fighting a collective battle against diseases and pests of crop plants. On one side, this battle is yet to be won and on other side, food demand is increasing with population growth. Emergence and spread of novel and highly harmful crop diseases like the stem rust UG99 that attacks wheat, black pod in Cocoa and viral infections of Cassava suggest that the situation may in fact be worsening.

Many other organizations are working on developing similar solutions to benefit agriculture industries using advanced technologies like AI, IOT and we hope that everyone can come together and collaborate for creating a better future for our next generations to come. And do this FASTER.

 

– The article is attributed to Mr. Vishal Goyal, Head of Digital COE under LOS business unit, Fujitsu Consulting India


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