Minoo Rathnasabapathy: Hello everyone.
My name is Dr. Minoo Rathnasabapathy and I'm a research engineer at the space enabled research
group at MIT's Media Lab.
On behalf of space enabled and our co-organizers for this event, the secure world foundation
were pleased to welcome you to the serving society with space data webinar series.
This virtual series aims to engage a multi-stakeholder audience in a discussion of how space technology
and geospatial applications are contributing to achieving the sustainable development goals,
as well as highlighting opportunities and challenges and expanding the use of satellite
data.
Now we'll be using the STGs as our framework, but the key here is to talk about the intersection
of space data and development projects.
The webinar series will be held twice a month and we'll address critical issues, including
food security, energy, health, democracy, and governance, as well as many more topics.
Each webinar will bring together a panel of topical experts who have been doing this work
for a really long time, and allows them to highlight their projects and their activities
that happening around the world to solve some of these problems.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: And we're working to integrate new data sources
of the earth observation is just one.
So we kick off our first webinar series today addressing SDG two zero hunger, which aims
to end all forms of hunger and malnutrition by 2030.
Meaning, eliminating under nourishment for all.
This involves promoting sustainable agriculture, supporting small scale farmers and equal access
to land technology and markets, as well as supporting international cooperation to ensure
investment in infrastructure and technology to improve agricultural productivity.
So our panel today features experts from industry academia, agency and intergovernmental development
organizations.
And who will showcase real world applications of space data to address food security around
the world and demonstrate the role of space technology as a evidence based policy tool,
for monitoring fruit security, as well as increasing agricultural productivity and production.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: But we also want to hear from you.
So as part of our webinar today, we'll be using the Slido web platform to run live audience
questions during this webinar, and also allow time for audience Q and A without panelists.
So we invite you to go to Slido either on the app or the website and use our event page
SDG two.
We'll also be following up the webinar with a post webinar survey to gain insights from
you, the audience on your priority areas, challenges, opportunities, as well as examples
of your own work with regards to SDG Two.
So with that said, let's get started.
Our first audience poll question is live on the Slido app, and again uses the card SDG
Two.
Let me bring that up.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: So you see here that we're asking the audience,
how do you define food security?
This is a very broad question and we're really hoping from perspectives from different sectors
and people working on this particular question.
So with that in mind, let's go to our speakers.
And our very first speaker is Dr. Arif Husain, who's the chief economist and director of
research assessments and monitoring division at a UN World Food Program.
Arif's work focuses on analyzing food security and welfare conditions in developing countries
to inform humanitarian response.
His research interests include the application of information technologies to improve humanitarian
response.
And his research interests include finding solutions for poverty, hunger, conflict, and
migration and analyzing how global economic shocks impact fruit security, social protection,
and emergency and development assistance.
So our, Arif, SDG two is core to the World Food Program.
So we really look forward to your insights and activities.
Dr. Arif Husain: Thanks Minoo.
Good afternoon.
Good morning, everyone.
Let me just start by telling you a little bit about World Food Program.
It is the largest humanitarian agency of the UN system.
We are present in about 80 countries.
These are the poorest of the poor countries in the world.
Last year, we assisted about 100 million people in about 80 countries.
Our assistance includes things like giving direct assistance, direct food, but also cash.
For example, we give cash to about 28 million people.
School meals to about 18 million kids, and then nutritional assistance to mothers and
young children put about 17 million.
So our footprint is quite big in the humanitarian world, but also in the development world.
Now, in order to do all of this, we have to answer questions like who needs assistance
when, where, why, and for what type of assistance.
And that is the type of work which then we do through our assessments and through our
monitoring activities.
Dr. Arif Husain: Now, when times are normal things are okay
and places are normal.
You can actually go in and launch face to face assessments.
You can do big surveys, you can do small service, but even in normal times when you have war
or when you have disease, it's not that easy to go in and do these assessments.
For those purposes, then we start to use what we call a mobile monitoring or remote monitoring.
This is something which currently we are doing in about 30 countries.
And right now, as you know with COVID, it's probably the only way of getting this information
out in terms of not only how people are surviving, what is their food situation, but also how
COVID is impacting their lives.
So if I can quickly share my screen.
This is something which we call hunger map life.
This is information from about 90 countries, both real time.
Like I was saying from about 30 countries.
And now casting for an additional 60 countries.
Dr. Arif Husain: So if you look at this page, you can see on
the left hand side, 0.97 billion these are the number of people who at the moment don't
have enough, adequate consumption.
14 countries have very, very high risks or high levels of hunger as we speak.
On the right side, this is what is happening on the COVID.
Meaning confirmed cases, as well as deaths and high income countries, upper middle income
countries and lower middle income countries.
Then you see these alerts and there are three types of alerts here.
One the light blue one that is where the food security situation is very quickly deteriorated.
And then the purple one is where COVID cases are doubling every three days.
And then that violet color is essentially a game COVID cases.
Doubling every seven days.
Dr. Arif Husain: Now if you look underneath you got different
things, for example you can see, this is all by the way in real time 24 hours slack, in
terms of what type of hazards are happening in different parts of the world.
You can check those out.
Then if you want to also look at what's happening on the conflict side, which is already a big
deal, you can see different types of conflicts, meaning battles, violence, protest, riots,
all of those.
And then on the right side, you can go and you can look at, let's say rainfall, let me
put the...
There comes the rainfall, so you can see how the vegetation is.
Rainfall proceeding.
And also if you want, you can go and look at the vegetation index.
Now this is all on the global level, but what if you're interested in looking at the country
level.
And let's just pick the first one that is Afghanistan in here, you can now start to
see all the variables, for example, population, how many people are not having sufficient
food consumption.
Dr. Arif Husain: Whether that rate is increasing over the last
one month, or it is decreasing.
What is the situation of acute malnutrition?
How many people are...
Actual number of people who are not having sufficient consumption?
What are the types of coping strategies they're using?
What is the exchange rate?
What is the balance of trade?
How the headline inflation and food inflation are working.
And you can find all of this information there, but also let me just make sure this is...
my internet is...
Okay.
And then basically what you can do is you can also look at the country snapshots themselves
on a weekly basis.
So here you can come down and you can see what is happening country by country, in terms
of their food security situation on a timeline essentially.
And that is extremely important information.
When we are looking at telling the situations in different countries.
Here, you can see for 18 countries, which are of extreme interest to us.
You can see what is the food security situation on the right hand side, 164 million people
with insufficient consumption, what type of coping strategies they are using.
Dr. Arif Husain: So this is, are they skipping meals?
Are they using inferior quality food?
Are they taking debt on things like that?
How many people have access to health facilities?
How many people have access to market facilities?
What type of livelihood coping they're using?
And then, like I was saying, you can also see how COVID is multiplying in different
parts of the world.
So there is a lot of information, all of this real time near real time information, which
I would encourage you to do actually go and look through it.
And I think I'm going to stop here.
Thank you.
And let me hand back my screen.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: Thank you very much Arif.
I think the visualization, especially on a daily basis is incredibly powerful.
And we'll talk a little bit further in the question and answer session about how countries
are using this sort of data to make their...
To use that sort of data, to make policy decisions.
So we now go to our next speaker Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef who's the director of the NASA
Harvest Program.
So that's, NASA's applied science program on food security and agriculture housed at
the university of Maryland.
She's also the program scientist at the GEOGLAM secretariat.
Her work is focused on the application of satellite information for agricultural monitoring
from the field to global scales in support of decisions in food security and agricultural
markets.
So Inbal, were very excited to have you join us this panel, and it would be great to hear
an overview of NASA Harvest and the program that you lead.
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: Great, thank you very much Minoo, for the
introduction and for the invitation to participate in this panel.
So I'll briefly introduce the NASA Harvest Program, some of our objectives, what we're
trying to do.
And then try to give you some examples, concrete examples of some of the activities that we
have ongoing in particular in the framework of supporting food security decisions.
Next.
And so very briefly Harvest was launched in 2017, and this is quite an innovation program
for, for NASA.
It sits under its applied sciences program.
But it's the first time that NASA competes a program and actually implemented outside
of the directness of headquarters structure.
And so NASA Harvest is a multi-sectoral consortium.
We have quite a large range of partners that you can see their logos here.
That range from various UN organizations, ministries of agriculture and various other
government humanitarian sector, private sector, research organizations, space agency.
So, we tried to really integrate participants across the agricultural sector.
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: Our primary objective is to enable and advance
the use of satellite data, both domestically and internationally, both for public and private
sector to benefit decisions within food security and agriculture.
We're very much focused on our end users.
And so any activity, any program that we start always starts with our stakeholders.
And that is to make sure that we're able to really bridge the gap between research into
operations.
And making sure that any data, any products, any services that we developed are developed
directly with the stakeholder community and that that stakeholder community, is really
driving what we're doing.
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: Some of the thematic areas that we cover are
our food security and early warning, markets and trade.
We've got a lot of work on yield, crop yield, forecasting prep type area and identification
and estimation.
We have some various...
We have a very global perspective at the same time.
We do have some regions that we focus on, both in the U.S across Africa, the Americas,
as well as a focus on developing information systems.
And I should also note for those of you familiar with the G20 GEOGLAM program, I don't have
time to fully introduce that.
But this is not such as contribution into the GEOGLAM program.
Next.
And so the part of the reason that so decided to launch this applied sciences program at
the moment, NASA of course, has been involved in many space agencies, in agricultural monitoring.
And in fact, that dates all the way back to the early 70s, to the beginning of satellite
remote sensing.
But today we find ourselves in an exciting and new era for satellite data in particular
for agricultural monitoring.
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: And this is not only owing to the large advances
in large scale computing and big data and cloud computing, but also due to the launch
of new satellites and constellations, as well as making those free and openly available
publicly.
And when you saw that animation was of the East side of Sentinel-2, that's today providing
us data at the 10 meter resolution globally every two to five days, and that's free and
open.
Next.
What that means is that we're today in a very different spot than we were just a few years
ago, where traditionally and still do of course use a lot, the so called 250 meter resolution.
And here's a visualization of what that means or what we can visualize.
And today we have close to three meter resolution data daily.
And so this has really advanced significantly what we can do and really helping us deliver
on the long health promise, that has been there since the beginning really, on remote
sensing for agriculture, the applications.
Next.
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: So one of our large initiatives is within
the GEOGLAM program and in particular, it's called the crop monitor initiative.
And the objective here is to provide simple to understand information that is current
on global crop production, and global actually crop conditions as the season is progressing.
Both for informing the policy and the markets community as well as for the early morning
community.
And so this is our map that we released at the end of May.
We'll be releasing the next one next Thursday, and I've highlighted here a few key areas.
And so basically just quickly, we're only looking at global crop lands.
The areas that are in yellow or red are areas where there are concerns.
And I've tried to highlight a few that I think are quite important one, across Europe we've
seen dry conditions that have particularly impacted wheat.
Europe is a large wheat producer.
On the other side of highlighted Eastern Africa, that is experienced not only large scale sledding
is experiencing the threat of locusts as well as some areas that are in conflict.
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: And I want to talk about also implications
for COVID-19.
At the same time I've also highlighted in blue, some of the areas that are doing very
well.
These are some of the large production areas of the world.
And so it's really important for us to be looking at conditions as a global system.
And obviously what happens in Australia for example, does impact international markets.
So, and one important thing to note is actually at the moment, food supplies on the current
seasons overall at the global scale are adequate and there's good production.
That of course doesn't mean that there are, of course, a lot of areas in the world that
are suffering different threats to food security and to food production.
But at least for the big production and export countries, for the most part conditions look
fairly the good.
And so this information next, where this came from the development of the crop monitor was
in response to a request, both from the G20 AMIS community, as well as the early warning
community.
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: Today, we have over 40 contributing partners
that produced these maps.
And so these are consensus driven information.
And large part based on satellite, remote sensing, but also on ground observations and
modeling and various other pieces of information that go into those.
And this is really the first time the international community comes together to produce operational
consensus driven crop assessments.
So we publish these in two different monthly bulletins.
One is called the AMIS market monitoring the other is the crop monitor for early warning.
Next.
So one of, I think the really important contributions of this activity is to help reduce uncertainty
and to help build consensus.
And this is particularly important when we're informing humanitarian and national food security
decisions.
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: And here I'm showing an inter-agency discrepancies
in the big map there.
And basically what pops out is particularly Eastern Africa.
What that means is over the past few years, we've accumulated where there were discrepancies
across the different humanitarian organizations that contribute to this, and you can see their
logos on the right side.
And what we do is every month we go through and we resolve every single discrepancy, we
try to find various information and evidence both from remote sensing and from ground networks
that these different agencies have.
And this is really important that we then do come to a consensus, given that so many
decisions are being based off of these assessments from the different agencies.
Next.
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: And so one of the things we've done is evolved
this into working at the national scale and working with different organ and ministries
in particular, in Eastern Africa, for them to develop their own crop monitors and information
systems.
And we have operational ones in Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya.
Here's an example from Uganda where they've used the information system that's at the
basis and the analysis at the basis of this crop monitor, to inform their disaster relief
program.
And I won't read out the quote.
This is from Martin Owor, the commissioner within in the office of the prime minister
in Uganda.
And basically they were able to trigger this disaster relief fund.
And we're able to reach 290,000 people and save 2.6 million off of their own budget.
Next.
Sorry.
Next, again.
Another example of the contribution and in a different way of satellite data in the current
context.
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: And then at the moment of the pandemic, we
got a request, the government of Togo launched an innovative program for farmers.
To help them purchase inputs and rent machinery through a digital wallet program that they
launched, especially to help farmers that were being impacted by various COVID policies.
And one of the things they needed to know is where are the farmers as a lot of them
are registered, do farming as a second job.
And so they might be registered as a teacher or as a technician.
And so we developed a 10 meter map of croplands across the country within 10 days, I needed
this information to be up-to-date.
And this was a contribution this went into then designing this program and how to reach
as many farmers as they could.
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: Just went into then designing this program
and how to reach as many farmers as they could.
Speaker 1: Next.
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: And so, just as a final slide, I was asked
to talk a little bit about some challenges and opportunities for operational uptake.
I think it's a major challenge to transition out of research and into operations.
I think we see quite a lot of siloed communities.
I think often within the remote sensing community, we develop products that we think should be
very useful.
And then we sit there and wonder why nobody is using them and so I think that we, we see
different types of challenges really for being able to do this, of course, on the technical
side, whether it's ground truth, data, developing robust methods, but also really being able
to bridge the gap between different siloed communities, whether it's through policy makers,
economists and so really being able to make sure we're speaking the same languages that
they're aware of what we can do and vice versa, we're aware of what the needs are.
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: Making sure that we're really driven by the
stakeholders and so that's a research and development is driven by needs and that they're
integrated into that whole process to make sure that we do you see adoption of that and
also making sure that we're really increasing their awareness and a very honest about what
the current capabilities are, but also what the limitations are and I think we've often
seen a huge over promising what remote sensing can do and I think we've got to be very careful
about where we are today, where we need to go and what we can and cannot do.
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: We also see of course, a lot of opportunities
and specifically within the context of what I said, I think we really do see ourselves
in a very different era.
That's really revolutionized our ability to provide information that's accurate, that's
timely, that's actionable, and at scale and therefore, we've seen a real huge increase
in demand from a wide range of applications and sectors for better integration and utilization
of satellite data... and I think also specifically within the context of SDGs here, for example,
I think there's a lot more room still for integration of satellite data into monitoring
some of the indicators within SDG and integrating that into some of the organizations that are
very much involved in implementation and then stewarding the SDGs, and I'll stop there.
Thank you.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: Great.
Well, thank you so much.
You touched on some really important points and one of which was the current pandemic
situation and so we'll address that in our Q&A, a little bit later, but one thing that
really stuck with me is, you know, you said that often we work in silos.
And that's actually the purpose of this webinar series, to bring together panelists, but audiences
as well really from different sectors to see what commonalities we have in the issues and
challenges that we're facing with regards to food security, and also see how we can
better utilize space data to find solutions for these.
So thank you very much [inaudible 00:26:05]
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: With that, I will go to our third speaker
professor [Dara 00:26:10] and [Tukabi 00:03:12], who's the bacardi Stockholm water foundations
professor at MIT in the department of civil and environmental engineering with a joint
appointment at the department of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences.
[Dara 00:26:27] is also the science team lead for the NASA's soil moisture active and passive
mission, which was launched in 2015.
His research includes terrestrial remote sensing and coupled land atmosphere systems modeling.
So [Dara 00:26:44] , thank you for joining us on a panel today, and it's really valuable
to get this academic perspective and insight into not just what our current technology
is, but also the challenges and opportunities that you're uncovering through your research,
so thank you for joining us.
Dara: Okay.
Thank you.
Let me share the screen.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: So [Dara 00:00:27:13], I have your slides
up here.
[crosstalk 00:27:19] So go ahead.
Dara: Okay.
So thanks for the invitation to this webinar, and thanks for organizing it.
I would like to sort of give perspective from a technologist and a climate science point
of view, and on this topic I've been involved in this current NASA mission called Soil Moisture
Active Passive, obviously soil moisture is the target and the reason we targeted that,
that in both science and applications, in fact, this is one NASA mission where the science
and applications were developed together because soil moisture is both in the climate system,
as well as in drought monitoring, food security, and flood prediction, a daily used valuable,
but before this, the space born view of it, the synoptic view of it was not available.
So now there's five years of data.
So we've had a chance to advance in some of these science and applications.
The reason why so much in the application areas is targeted is that the very definition
of agricultural drought is a prolonged and persistent deficit in this variable.
Dara: In fact, it's defined through it.
So, so much your deficit defines the drought.
So what the smart mission provides is a every two to three days, a global map of surface
soil moisture on how it evolves in order to provide that it has to go to very low frequency
microwaves, so that means that it can see through clouds, it can see regardless of solar
elimination, and also most importantly, they see through a moderate vegetation, we just
don't want to remotely sense what we see namely bare ground, but under vegetation and crops.
What you give up when you do that is very high resolution.
So in low frequency microwave, you just can't collect the data at the resolution that would
be at the field scale, but it is an optic view.
Dara: Now, [inaudible 00:29:44], one thing that
the measurements can sense is not only the water content in the soil, but what is the
water content in the vegetation throughout the canopy, so it's a measure of how much
plant water uptake is happening and growth in the plant is happening and they're simultaneously
present, so you can track both in time and throughout the growth season, and just a few
examples of application of it, of these two data sources is shown to the right in three
examples.
These are three existing examples just picked a few.
One of them is to provide maps of soil moisture anomalies and throughout the world, and for
that, we've partnered with the USDA foreign agricultural service, so here's something
off of their webpage just shows combination of smart data and there's forecast and monitoring
systems for basically drought indicators around the globe...
Dara: And then on the bottom right, is an example
of what happens when soil moisture and plant water contents evolve over time.
This is for instance, yield for a crop and knowing how the soil moisture and the plant
water evolve over the growth cycle is actually allows you to have an outlook of what the
yield would look like at the end of the season, because for various crops, like for instance,
maize, there's a silking stage, which is sort of mid growth, is the critical point in the
middle of the summer where it Northern hemisphere, where it will determine what the yield will
be towards the late summer/early fall.
Dara: And that critical stage is a growth stage
and it's different for different crops.
So by looking at how the soil water and the vegetation are evolving throughout the growth
season allows you to have a outlook of what the yield will be at the end of the season.
So it's some warning in advance, some sort of value in lead time and on the top right,
is another example at the other extreme, this is sort of looking at the tropical forests
and when the water [inaudible 00:32:27] by the plants and their growth patterns, you
can map the carbon density tons per hectare in the tropical regions.
So this is the kind of things that I've been working on this particular mission has provided.
Let me go to the next slide, just a few things about what obstacles and challenges exist,
very much in line with what [inaudible 00:33:02] was mentioning a minute ago.
Dara: And one thing, I think is important to communicate
is that space borne measurement do not replace ground measurements because we can see a map
of let's say, precipitation, or temperature, or something from space, doesn't obviate the
need for in installing stations on the ground of doing crop surveys and things that really
are needed in order to extract the value out of all measurements.
Dara: The second thing is that what satellites measure
are often different than what has an equivalent underground and their value isn't really that
in complimenting rather than, and replacing, and one thing that the third point is that
the value of mapping from space is that we're not just collecting a bunch of pixels that
each under own is the equivalent of what's happening.
If you had a station at that point, but what is the synoptic view?
How is the drought expanding and what are the indications for seasonal outlook of this
drought, and that is connecting points in space and looking at the patterns of growth,
and decline, and shifts translation of anomalies within the climate system where everything's
connected, and that allows us to extract some sort of a future outlook to forecast ahead,
which is really where the value is in applications by looking at the spatial structure, and that
is the extracting value out of these kind of data.
Dara: And next slide, last two points is also in
bold mentioned for instance, with Sentinel one and two which are fantastic data sets
from ISA, all of NASA measurements and also increasingly international space agencies
and environmental agencies, is these data under WMO protocols are public, or they should
be public.
And we're seeing an erosion of that, and that would be, I think, devastating for the stakeholders
in the user community and agencies and institutions around the world, and if public data is value
added and then it's proprietary, then that should be really well justified and scrutinized.
Dara: You know, it's, it's the keeping environmental
data public is really a public good global public good and we have to be vigilant.
We are losing [inaudible 00:36:13] you're losing parts of the spectrum where we can
do sensing and we're losing public data sharing, and the last point is that it's difficult
to build for, or design information, dissemination systems and delivery systems, information
delivery to stakeholders and recipients when the gap between wealth and wellness between
the haves and have-nots around the world are vastly expanding.
So it's just, it becomes inaccessible, a bridge that can't be crossed if current trends continue.
Dara: So with that, I'll just stop
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: [Dara 00:36:56], thank you so much.
You mentioned seasonal outlook growth patterns and anomalies, and I know that that's what
your research is really looking into that forecasting of crop yield.
So during question and answer, we look forward to getting a little bit deeper into those
sorts of questions and just for everybody's awareness, we do have a scheduled time for
question and answer that we'll get to after our panelists presentations, and with that,
I would like to introduce our last but not least speaker Dr. Anastasia [Bulkova 00:37:36],
Anastasia is MIT's 35, under 35 innovator in the APAC and an Amelia Earhart fellow.
She founded her company [Flores 00:37:46] in 2016, and has since taken the company through
transformational journey of commercializing agricultural science and growing it's decision
support platform to support users in more than 14 countries globally.
Anastasia we're seeing a increase in the number of startups that are going into the act tech
sector.
So we're really looking forward to getting your insights as an entrepreneur who is tackling
food security.
Thanks for joining us.
Anastasia: Thank you so much for new and thank you to
the previous speakers for sharing your insights and your experience and making my job easier
to explain where to from here, let's start with the slide deck.
T`hank you so much Minoo.
So I would like to extend what [Arufibal 00:38:39] and [Dara 00:38:40] was saying to the field
level, to the human level, to the pharma level and the advisor who's working with that farmer,
and this is where really [Flores 00:38:51] has business is.
We have been working for the last four years, really helping agronomist.
This is a technical term for a crop advisor who practices the science of crop science.
So agronomists are the decision makers often whilst the farmers listen to their advice
and we call them crop doctors, and so let's have a look briefly at what has the company
achieved in how it's connecting the dots on the remote sensing side from different angles.
Anastasia: Next slide.
Thank you.
Anastasia: So just briefly, some of the logos you've
already seen in this slide, for example, [Inval 00:39:31] has one of the collaborators from
Australia being this TSI road, the Commonwealth science and research agency, they, one of
our investors behind [Flores 00:39:39] and what we really set out to achieve is to take
that science that exist and take it that final step further in commercialization, but also,
as I mentioned earlier in, in ground truth and similarly in the application space to
really derive it to the point where the farmer agronomists can rely on it.
Currently it's offered globally, but we are actively supporting users in 14 countries
while the users from anywhere can jump on our platform, and recently we hosted so called
a virtual agronomy course that had users from 65 countries, for example.
So we see that people really need this intelligence and, and adopted nicely.
Anastasia: Next slide.
Thank you.
Anastasia: I wanted to touch base and address our diverse
audience and say, or if you think this is all about scientist, and this is all about
people who studied the remote sensing or agriculture, I just want to demystify this, and I can only
reassure you that anyone can make an impact in this space and food is just so integral
to what we do and every day in our lives, that if this is the problem you care about,
the technical sector and agriculture is definitely growing that's what's called Ag-tech and where
we're attracting and striving to attract some of the best specialists and we have a wonderful
team that actually is a combination of scientists, technologists who built data-driven startups
before, and people who have worked with agri-businesses or even had like, like me, my good mother
and granny had a little veggie patch and a little potato field and the sunflower field
in the country of Ukraine, and I never thought that I would be spending my life looking at
agricultural fields out or doing like many of us remote sensing a degree.
Anastasia: Next slide, please.
Anastasia: I would like to touch on something that we're
really being centered around for this webinars series, the SDGs sustainable development goals
and I would like to highlight one important point.
Once we're talking today about the number two goal zero hunger, agriculture is something
that does affect [inaudible 00:00:42:01], other goals as well, including of course,
life on land and underwater, and you can research this a little bit more, but a lot of agricultural
products can be used in aquaculture as well as, so basically feeding feeding fish so that
this fat fish can later on be a human consumable product.
Of course, it's, it's obvious to YouTube, not just deforestation is the way that our
agriculture affects life on land, but we're talking a lot more about sustainable agriculture
and regenerative agriculture.
Anastasia: That is actually one of the more sustainable
ways to manage and go about sustaining the land we have to avoid dust bowls of Kansas,
and droughts in Australia, and so on.
And finally, of course, climate action, I think doesn't even need a comment on how the
list things combined, but I wanted to touch on water.
Agriculture is one of the industries that uses a lot of water, and sometimes it's the
largest water consumer out of all industries in particular countries and when we are thinking
about the fertilizer, for example, that has added into commercial production, that really
helps us secure the yield as, as RFM, the World Food Program, or have worried about,
we would need to make sure that we adequately grow enough supply of food, but then it takes
a lot to understand what is actually required and how to make sure it doesn't enter the
waterways.
Anastasia: So as you can see, this is exactly the system
that you would imagine it's complex, it's natural, and it's hitting several ones of
those SDGs.
So with this perspective, let's have a deeper look now that you know, that there is satellite
imagery at the high level they're seasonal outlooks, there's anomalies on country scales,
and soil moisture, and crop patterns, and yield.
How does that translate to what a farmer of what an advisor to a farmer can use?
Anastasia: Then the next slide, please.
Anastasia: I call this often farming with satellites
and I'm extremely privileged to talk to the intersection of the two communities today
with the visiting with speakers, where we not just acknowledged that ag exists, but
we can always, the satellites exist and they help ag.
This is not something that I think you wake up with when you think, "Oh, how does this
avocado come to me?" or "How do I get my bread?"
You're not worried about` GEOGLAM or [Flores 00:44:32] of the World, monitoring that food
was actually that's what's happening every day, and so let's quickly go through step
by step, how can we inform a decision makers on a daily basis to have the information they
have, they need, sorry to make informed and profitable and efficient decisions around
the food production.
Anastasia: So on the left hand side, you can see kind
of the inputs to it, to modeling, and this is, this is how we describe to our customers
what we do.
So hopefully this is going to do also be providing you some insight into how the data that we
talked about ties into this.
So if you can imagine there was there's a field somewhere, and that field is a point
in the map and there is many services nowadays that just like satellites for earth observation
that are mapping the surface in different bands, visual, and infrared, and microwave,
as was mentioned for soil moisture, there's obviously weather forecasting and looking
at the climate, and so you can get the data around climate and [inaudible 00:45:41] for
any place on earth, with more or less accuracy to know how much rainfall, radiation, what
the temperature has been.
These are fundamentals to understand what will the crop do if you can put it in the
soil.
Then similarly, as [Daren 00:45:58] mentioned is obviously soil moisture maps that were
not producing and several countries actually.
Anastasia: ... moisture maps that we're now producing
and several countries actually produce their higher resolution, more ground truth versions
locally.
What that gives us is the substrate for what they're going to put that crop into.
So did we have enough moisture accumulated over the winter when we're going to plant
the... when the winter crop's going emerge or the spring crop that we're going to plant,
will it be able to be sustained by that moisture?
What's the outlook look like?
And the final piece of information where it can really depends on the farmer is of course
the farm management input.
So we integrate with companies that offer farmers record keeping systems or systems
that allow to record machinery data.
So this package allows us to understand how did the soil look like, what was put in the
soil and what was the climate that allowed that soil pocket to develop what will turn
into the yield?
Anastasia: And as [Ingvall 00:46:59] mentioned, we need
to keep this in check.
So satellites is part of the puzzle, and we always say that apart from satellites, there's
actually agricultural science that allows us to say, if we choose this hybrid and put
it into this soil under this rainfall and radiance, this is what we should get in the
biomass at a certain growth stage and the yield potential.
So let's imagine for a second that you have access like [Floriset 00:47:26] does, to licenses
of these academic models, and you integrated them into the APIs of data flows of all these
different icons that we just talked about that determine the inputs.
So you are able to predict what the crop should look like on the daily time stamp or based
on the weather.
And then what happens is pretty magical, especially when you think of someone who just farms their
crop.
Anastasia: They don't think necessarily about the satellite
passing over their head every so often.
And there's more and more of those satellites.
And we use the same constellations that have been mentioned plus additional commercial
constellations.
What happens is that when you are able to predict where the crop should be, you can
then actually use satellite imaging or other remote sensing sources to sense to take a
measurement.
And that measurement, you know of course, it has its own uncertainty, but you can take
a measurement every three to four to five days everywhere on earth to see where that
crop is up to.
Do we see it emerge?
Do we see the biomass increase?
Do we see it developing?
And this is what we can call calibration that maybe we've overestimated the soil moisture.
Maybe we misunderstood how cold it was.
Maybe we misunderstood the planting density that the farmer used.
Anastasia: And then we can bring that system together
to be more accurate, real-time site-specific.
And here I mean this field and sub-field level agriculture, and this is what's called precision
agriculture.
In the next slide, we will quickly breeze through the following.
There's just a couple of images, just in the same way that the previous panelists have
given you the idea visually what you interact with.
There is number of insights that we highlight, but this is for example, for a large potato
producing region, and per-field breakdown of growth stages at a certain given point
in time for a large food processor in the Pacific Northwest in America.
What this allows us to do is that...
COVID hit restaurant businesses, restaurant businesses hit potato industry.
What does this mean for our potato production next year?
I would not go further into this.
You can read this online, but this is the type of information that is actionable operationally
to people making decisions on a daily basis.
Anastasia: Next slide, please.
We can use remote sense information, not just to try to figure out what transitions we're
looking at, but actually some events we can see how the plants emerge.
And we can just very simply on the graph on the right hand side, you basically, if you
put a point somewhere in this field, you will get a graph like this, and you'll be able
to, at the top there there's some growth stage predictions where we say, okay, we think the
crop is in this growth stage.
Take the satellite observation, have a look if it compares, if it makes sense.
Then we can detect the harvest, we can detect if all the biomass has survived to harvest,
or was it killed by frost or hail or something else.
Anastasia: Next slide, please.
Something that [Arif 00:50:34] touched on and also had on his slides.
This is for example, fields in Cote [d'Ivoire 00:51:46] . And I want to give you an example,
we knew nothing about those fields.
We were given a polygon, a multinational company that is operating in the food processing space
has attracted us to help monitor these remote areas, where there is no knowledge of what
has been planted and when and what cultivar that was.
And so I'm showing you a brief outline that is then populated by the remote sensing imagery.
So this is the biomass index.
And as [Darren 00:51:11] mentioned, there's a time serious to this, to this business.
And so you can see that the small polygons are drawn over the larger polygon where you
select a quadrant or a particular area in the field.
And we're able to get a graph on the right and to you from the kind of the distance,
I just wanted to demonstrate a point that the graphs are not aligned.
Anastasia: The graphs are very different.
They go in different directions that are phase offsets.
And this is how you can figure out if you know, for example, that you have 10 predominant
crops grown in Cote d'Ivoire, and this is how the [inaudible 00:51:49] cashew should
look like versus cotton versus sorghum or other crops.
Anastasia: Next slide, please.
You can also obviously do it on the regional scale, as I mentioned.
And this is where we can talk about the crop type identification that was also mentioned
within the NASA harvest geo clam program, it's really important for us to understand
what crop is being grown on the field level.
And I want to bring those down to actually ground truth things.
So when Ingvall was talking about and was saying, we need ground tracing for the remote
sensing data, in a way, really the people who are touching the farmer, who are touching
their agronomist, who have been granted the access to their farm management systems to
improve the monitoring.
Anastasia: And so we have the ground truth and we try
to marry them.
We try to say, if satellite says this, this is what the ground truth then gives us.
And this allows then for the flow on benefits to go in both directions, to the people who
need to plan for disaster response and be alarmed by anomalies and to people who need
to manage their cashflow and their families by growing crops in their fields.
Anastasia: Next slide, please.
Just quickly, I thought it would make sense to touch on the cutting edge application.
All of the remote sensing data has higher and higher resolution is actually seeing how
regenerative the farming is.
And this is where we can say, was it tilled?
Was it not tilled?
There was a cover crop.
There wasn't a cover crop.
How much nitrogen?
Was there too much nitrogen applied to this field.
And this is obviously something you consumers care about a lot.
And I just wanted to touch base on that this is actually the new kind of frontier we're
pushing here, and I want to stop there.
Thank you very much.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: Anastasia, thank you so much.
And thank you for introducing us to the terminology agronomist.
So here we are, we have some agronomists in the audience as well, but it's really interesting
to get an entrepreneurial insight as to what's coming next for food security.
So with that, as you'll remember, we started a poll question at the very beginning.
So we've got some answers here.
If we go down to... so we asked the audience, how do you define food security?
And we have a couple of answers here.
The lack of caloric and nutritional intake.
Secure food for me, would be affordable and mostly healthy.
And as I mentioned, this is a fairly complex question.
And Arif maybe I'll throw this to you.
How does the world food program define food security and how is this term different to
sustainable agriculture?
Dr. Arif Husain: Thank you.
It is quite a complicated question.
And essentially when we're talking about food security, we're talking about four different
things.
One is that food has to be available, right?
The second one is that it has to be accessible and accessibility is both physical accessibility,
but also it is economic accessibility, meaning being affordable.
The third one is that it is about utilization.
You should know how to utilize that food.
And it may sound surprising, but in many places that could be a big issue.
And then the fourth thing is that it has to be stable.
The availability has to be stable.
The access has to be stable.
So when these things come together, essentially you're talking about nutritious food, adequate
food available at all times, for an active and a healthy lifestyle.
That's what food security definition is.
Now coming to the part of sustainable agriculture, that is ensuring sustainable availability
of food.
Dr. Arif Husain: And when we talk about sustainability, that
is also environmental sustainability, that is making sure that the proper agricultural
practices are insured and things like that happens.
But that is about availability, and I think that's something you'd really need to keep
in mind, that instead of just talking about sustainable agriculture, you should also need
to talk about sustainable food systems, because food systems are essentially the whole chain.
So that is where you're talking about sustainable agriculture.
You're talking about access, you're talking about waste, you're talking about affordability,
all of those things together.
So the term which we are commonly using now is how do we fix broken food systems in many
of these countries, so food is available and it is affordable and it is of high quality.
And, if we can get to that, we may get to zero hunger.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: Thank you Arif.
That was very insightful.
And as you mentioned, it's so interlinked as well as we see with many of the SDGs that
zero hunger affects many different other SDGs.
We do want to keep the active poll going.
So we have now released another poll question for the audience.
This looks at the factors, in your opinion, that influence food security and we're looking
at the short term for now.
So really looking at the next two to three years.
So go ahead and choose your top three factors that you think will influence food security
and we'll try and get the panelists' insight and feedback on that as well.
So with that, let's shift a little bit to a few questions to the panelists.
Arif, let me start with you.
So you recently wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times, which by the way, for
the audience, if you haven't checked out as yet, it's really fantastic, highly recommended.
And, Arif, you highlighted at the end of that piece, a call to action for a global collective
action in order to build resilient communities and nations.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: So what role do you think technology plays
as a policy tool for food and nutrition security?
Dr. Arif Husain: Thank you for saying that.
I think, just as a background, every crisis has a silver lining.
So maybe the silver lining for this crisis is that we come out stronger, and coming out
stronger there means that people can afford the basics.
And there's nothing more basic than food.
And what that then means is several different things have to come up and technology is one
of them.
First of all, you have to have the enabling environment.
You got hunger because there are lots of wars.
You got hunger because there's lots of conflicts.
You got hunger because there is economic marginalization all over the place, which is a combination
of all these things.
So unless we sort those things out, we cannot create the enabling environment where you
can say, "Okay, let's go and do develop."
So the first thing is, and where technology helps, is to get the wrong right, to get the
problem right.
Dr. Arif Husain: And when we are able to do that, we are able
to progress the right type of interventions.
Now, for me, I'm an avid user of technology.
And in my head, technology can do two things.
One is it can help you do whatever you were doing before, but faster, for example.
The other thing which is quite more useful is that it opens other doors.
It allows you to do things that you couldn't do before.
And, on the agricultural side, to me, especially with this group, I think the biggest value
is even figuring out what is the level of agricultural production in [inaudible 01:01:02]
DRC or South Sudan or Somalia in these places.
We don't know.
We use paper and pencil still, right?
So on one side, clearing that up.
And you know that you cannot send people to ground truth, but you still know that people
are producing.
Dr. Arif Husain: People are living.
Can technology help them?
I think that is coming out clearly that yes, it can.
The second thing, which I find really, really interesting is drought, prediction of droughts
in the linkages of crop moisture stress through satellites to drip irrigation systems.
So it is an automatic system where crop indicates a stress and water comes, and that's sustainable
water use.
So the tools, the tricks, everything is there.
It is a matter of making sure that they get applied to where they're needed and which
are not on people's usual... the places where we work are not on people's usual screens.
And if we can do that, we create an enabling environment.
We create the sense in communities that there is something, and there is something to live
for.
And I think we are there.
Just need to take this step of bringing policy, dealing with root causes, enabling conditions
and technology together so we can have effective solutions.
Thank you.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: Yeah.
Thank you very much.
And that's exactly what we're hoping to get out of this webinar series to bring people
together and make sure that the policy folks are talking to the engineers who are designing
the satellite systems, who are then talking to their governments, who are then talking
to policy makers.
There's a whole community of stakeholders that need to be involved with us.
So thank you very much Arif.
Ingvall, if I could turn to you, I recently read a paper that you wrote that said that
earth observation plays a key role in early warning of reduced agriculture production
and is therefore a key component of SDG too.
And you briefly mentioned in your presentation, the COVID-19 pandemic.
So I'm sure you've got many examples, but maybe you can give us just one example of
an opportunity where we can better utilize space technology and remote sensing.
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: Sure.
Great.
Thank you.
And maybe building on what Arif just said, I think there is some silver lining in the
current pandemic that we're going through and that hopefully that highlights again,
very much following on his point of where we can do better.
And so I think, as an example, a lot of our different partners, different ministries of
agriculture were reporting to us at different times as we were, for example, working on
the crop assessments that I showed instead of what we actually don't have access because
of mobility restrictions due to COVID, we don't have access to the field.
And having access to the field, I mean, a lot of especially statistics, which a lot
of decisions are based on is how much food am I going to produce?
And whether that's used at the national scale for making different decisions or for informing
international grain markets, this is really, really important information to have.
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: And so not having access, for example, to
go down into the field and collect that ground data that we've talked about so much, that
is really important for any model you're going to develop, any statistic you're going to
develop, has meant that I think that that also highlights an opportunity on the remote
sensing side, which is to help better integrate.
And some governments do this very well and others don't at all, but help integrate more
technology, more of the remote sensing into the current monitoring systems and statistical
systems, so that when we do have a gap that, you know, how does the remote sensing information
and models, for example, relate to the various statistical methods?
How do you build the confidence to use that?
So you're not in a year that you have a crisis, all of a sudden saying, "Okay, I'm going to
use remote sensing, but I actually don't know how that relates back to my full time series."
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: And so really making sure that you can integrate
that as part of the information and also having a longer term view and plan.
And I think some of the challenges we've seen is large institutions perhaps change much
more slowly, then have a very established ways of working.
And, those are very hard to change in practice.
[inaudible 01:05:47] but then we've seen another institutions that are smaller, that are perhaps
more dynamic that don't use any remote sensing.
They might actually be much more open to taking in and uptaking this type of information.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: Great, thank you Ingvall.
And it just goes to show how flexible we have to be with the current situation that we're
in.
So I appreciate your insights on that.
Anastasia, I'll turn to you.
Now, sustainability, isn't a new idea in agriculture, but we're seeing an increase often urgently
where industry stakeholders are responding to a growing global population and environmental
constraints on productivity.
And I know that through Floriset you're helping to verify some of the farmers of what they're
demonstrating.
Can you elaborate a little bit on how ag tech providers such as Floriset are utilizing remote
sensing technology to provide this third party verification?
Anastasia: Absolutely.
Thanks for that interesting question.
I think sustainability as Arif mentioned, sustainable agriculture or sustainable food
system and dependent on how we want to look at it.
It still starts with a sustainable production, or sustainable production of inputs to agricultural
production.
So if we come back to the slide in the presentation, just mentally that I demonstrated, we were
looking at fields, we were looking at areas that required high resolution and detailed.
And so what can we do being the company that has looked for four years across all continents
on agricultural fields and has been ground truthing them.
We noticed that, as I mentioned, we can track some big events.
We can track the planting, the emergence, the harvest.
Anastasia: We can also see how the crop is evolving and
throughout the pandemic, really, the consumer interest to where the food is coming from
and how sustainably it was grown has been increasing as well as buying local tendency
and supporting the local food production because of potentially some of the failures in the
logistics of the food supply chain, but on that piece of consumer awareness and wanting
to know how something is produced and wanting to pass on that premium we are willing to
pay back to the farmer.
Anastasia: There's obviously a whole range of intermediaries
in the supply chain, the people who are cooperatives or food processors, large organizations that
are making it efficient, that are making it cost effective for us to process and get our
food from the farm to actually to the mill and then to the producer of food that are
ready for our consumption.
And so that traceability of the piece of knowing what happened in the field has been really
prohibitively costly.
Anastasia: ... Has been really prohibitively costly to
date, because as [inaudible 01:09:06] mentioned, we need to basically go and check out on the
fields, what's happening in the field.
And if you imagine the scale of our food production, especially some of the largest countries,
where food production is considered contribution to their GDPs.
When you're starting to think about ground-truthing hundreds of millions of fields, or millions
of acres per country, that very quickly becomes prohibitive.
And this is why that is really the bottleneck off of forwarding to trace the information
from the field to the consumer.
And what we're seeing now, as Minoo mentioned, is the ability of the brands who are in between
to really try to hedge that and say, "The farmer, we're going to pay you for the sustainable
practices because your more generative practice will contribute to the soil."
It's not just regenerative and sustainable food system or agriculture.
Anastasia: We actually think about a sustainable business.
Agriculture business is just like any other business.
And if they invest in soil, they invest in what's good for their crop, it's investment
longterm and we will have this producers for longer securing our food supply.
Anastasia: And so when you think of remote sensing piece
that needs to verify and help people unlock this bottleneck of, "How do I make sure that
all farmers that have told me that they planted the cover crop and they have used no-till
practice of planting.
How do I verify that?"
And this is where remote sense and higher resolution really provides the answer at scale,
because we can look at a very large areas cost-effectively, and then even at this stage,
pinpoint where we should ground truth with the same limited amount of people, [inaudible
01:11:06] who will go in and verify.
Because in this way, we're able to very efficiently extrapolate what we're seeing, not to relying
on something that is not data relying on data at scale, that is a bit less certain and relying
on experts to ground truth, to pinpointed so that we can really provide to the supply
chain some certainty of, "We can afford now to produce more sustainably.
We can afford to pay premium because we will afford the cost of verifying that premium
to consumer."
Anastasia: Ultimately, to support all of this consumer
dollars for premium and sustainability need to flow back.
And this is what they're starting to offer as cooperatives and food brands, and this
is really the start of it.
So it's very exciting that this idea that's has been around for forever.
And remote sensing is not new by itself has really now met the enabling technology with
the satellites that can give us the under three meters, the airplanes can give us a
few, two centimeter resolution.
That is what's unlocking it in addition to monitoring and modeling.
So that's what the consumers should vote with their dollar for and look out for in the market.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: Anastasia, thank you so much.
And I'm glad to hear that there are these incentive programs, and then we're utilizing
technology to verify and move towards this.
And as Arif mentioned, we're kind of on that verge of really making the most of that technology.
And again, it's so great to see it from an entrepreneurial perspective.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: So we are really running out of time.
We're about 15 minutes from the close of our webinar.
And I do want to hand it over.
I know that we're getting some great questions on the Slido app.
So let's open the question please.
Here we go.
Okay, great.
So this is a question for all the panelists and feel free to shout out by unmuting yourselves.
But how can policy law regulation contribute to your programs and goals?
So Arif, maybe you want to start first.
Dr. Arif Husain: Okay.
Yeah.
So no, I'm thinking that's a really tough and good question.
When you look at hunger, it is essentially a location-specific problem.
The answer is not location-specific, but the problem is location-specific, meaning you
are someplace and you're hungry.
My thing is, I usually look at "What did countries, which did beat hunger do?"
There are many countries from South Korea to after the genocide Rwanda, which did quite
well.
If you look at that, you will find that there are five or six common things which happened.
One of them is empowerment of women.
Not because it sounds good to say that, but because that's 50% of the labor force.
Investment in children, less than two years of age, education, social protection, putting
money in the grassroots.
Dr. Arif Husain: And the fifth thing they always did was investment
in rural infrastructure, meaning roads, access to markets, electrification.
And now I add internet.
These are the physical things or things, policy actions you needed to take.
But on the side with that, you had political stability.
You had good governance, you have sustained investment and you had coordinated response.
If you pick all the countries, whether big or small, which really truly beat hunger,
they followed this.
And I think that hasn't gone away.
Dr. Arif Husain: That happened 10 years, 20 years ago.
The pace was slower.
Now because of technology because of visibility, the pace of these actions can be much faster.
But the basic principles are the same.
And I think that in a global world, we have a responsibility to in fact make sure that
in 21st century, we're still talking about famines.
There is fundamentally something wrong with it, when we know the solution.
So it's not necessarily about not knowing the solution.
It is about implementing those solutions.
Sorry for the long answer but I [inaudible 00:01:16:26].
Thank you.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: Okay.
That's perfect.
That's exactly what we want.
Inbal, would you like to respond to this as well?
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: Sure.
Yeah.
Thank you.
For us, one of the first things is just having the dialogue.
We try to very much be in large part driven by policy needs and being able to provide
there for actionable information that can inform those.
And I think that starts with one recognizing what are those priorities that our program,
for example, or that satellite data can contribute to?
And that means a two way dialogue with one us doing a better job at communicating what
current capabilities are and better understanding what those needs are.
And I can give some examples.
Actually a very good example is in Europe for the common agricultural policy, that's
the main agriculture policy for implementing, for example, subsidies or monitoring [inaudible
01:17:24] farmers implement the sustainability practices that we've just recommended to [inaudible
01:17:29] that they said they were, did they harvest at the right time?
Did they plant a cover crop?
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: And so they've rendered it actually into their
regulation, into their law, that satellite data should be used for that purpose.
That's a very good example of where that can make and impact in a very large impact.
And I think once other countries sees that that works, that's another very good way of
then making sure that that kind of capability is expanded.
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: It can also be, for example, understanding
better, where should a country be building more silos for example, or grain storage.
[inaudible 01:18:03] in that way as well, but looking at how is agriculture and productivity
distributed across a country where some optimal locations for putting that in.
You can think also about more financial instruments like insurance, for example, we're starting
to work with the insurance industry again there and with loans again, some of the questions
is, "How do you make that processes of payouts the most efficient?"
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: And so if you can reduce the cost on the insurance
industry side, that means that gets carried out back into the farmer side, or increasingly
giving farmers credit for using sustainable practices.
Again, as we've talked a lot about and being able to look at, "Well, what is the real impact
if I've utilized from no-till over the last 10 years and if put in a cover crop?
And can I demonstrate the benefit of that?"
And if I can, that might give banks more reason to give you a loan versus somebody else, or
better conditions on a loan or to an insurance industry.
A lot of what we've heard today is that there isn't enough evidence yet at large scale for
them to be integrating that into some of their programs.
I know some programs do and a lot of programs don't.
There are very different ways that you can read this question and answer that for a lot
of it comes first, but we're starting with the dialogue and being very clear about capabilities
and needs.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: Absolutely.
Inbal, thank you so much.
Anastasia, you mentioned a food supply chain.
So I want to pose this question to.
How does space knowledge can help obtain a sustainable food demand supply chain?
Anastasia: Just looking at the questions, which one we're
answering?
I heard you said it's the first one?
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: It's question three from the top.
How can space knowledge help obtain sustainable food demand?
Anastasia: I would like to follow on from Inbal's answer,
it's kind of answering a few of those questions, "What prevents us from just taking the space
at [inaudible 01:20:15] and satellite imagery and putting it in front of people who design
policy and plan in front of people who Arif is working?"
Whilst we, for example, can enable the irrigation system talk to the plant cover, and this is
what we're doing with one of our partners is a very different problem whenever you look
at different geography, whenever you look at different soil type, crop type.
And so you can have basically one satellite-based data source that needs to be so-called interpreted.
Anastasia: And this is why a company like ours exists
because we're trying to bridge the gap by bringing in the context.
You're not just looking at the satellite imagery, you're looking at the growth stage of the
plant and the crop cover within this certain expectation of it.
And so when we think about the sustainable food demand supply and using that data is
really having more local organizations help interpret and develop the use cases, or even
to take the same use cases, but give them the power and momentum locally that will enable
those local governments believe that this is something that needs to be invested in
such as in Europe.
Europe is the place where [inaudible 01:21:38] the program has originated from, and this
is where the governments inherently trust because they give to the satellite program
with their left hand and they give subsidies to farmers with their right hand.
Anastasia: And that is the same government.
And so they inherently understand that for sustainability we can just not ignore that
there are solutions to this problem, but methodically solve every step of it.
And we already solved the data availability it's out there.
And there's more data coming in verbalized in the value of it.
We've sold for some as Inbal mentioned a variety of use cases on the farm level, on the regional
level, on the government level, on the national or even global level.
But then how does everyone adopt it?
Everyone's context is different.
And so what it means to have sustainable food demand supply chain in Africa is very different
for what it means in America.
And so it can be the grain silos, but it can be the infrastructure and the truck, the truckies
are the movers of food in the US whilst this is very different in Europe.
Anastasia: And so you need to look at that complete supply
chain and then look at where does the space data help, what is already proven to have
very solid use case and how we can add to have a complete solution?
And this is what we're really obsessing at [inaudible 01:23:07] with how do we deliver
something that they can just act on, without needing one more yet, one more, and yet another
piece of information that's missing from that interpretation from that report?
So I think that's how you can think about it from the space knowledge, enabling the
food demand look local, and then what's the problem we're trying to solve and how many
pieces do we already have?
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: Excellent, thank you, your Anastasia.
You mentioned one word that really hit home for me and that's trust.
That's so critical when we talk about the value chain and the food supply chain, and
it really highlights how technology in general, as well as space technology can really be
that scientifically informed evidence-based tool that can help make these big policy decisions.
Now, I do realize that we're quickly running out of time, but there's one question here
that I just want each of you to give me a quick answer and that are identifying some
barriers of adoption when it comes to either using technology or data in general or satellite
data.
But what are the barriers that you come across, whether it be intergovernment development
organization, a startup, or even an agency with regards to decision making?
So maybe Arif we'll start with you.
Dr. Arif Husain: It's funny, you said trust one is just that.
Trust is sometimes adoption of new technologies for farmers.
It's a trust issue and you find that quite often.
But the barriers which we see is the adoptions of these one, understanding of the problem.
Second one, relevance of different sectors to that problem.
Think about this right now.
You have COVID and it is devastating countries left, right and center in terms of people.
But also the rest of the countries are extremely effective.
So the question becomes, "Okay.
Should we assist our people or should we go see somebody else's populations?"
In the short term, that has to be rethought because we live in a really connected world
and we have to be in a position where we are able to sort out problems at home, but also
in the neighborhood.
Because when we don't, that becomes an issue later.
So, that understanding is sometimes a problem.
Dr. Arif Husain: The second thing is that we do know the solutions,
but the solutions are not affordable.
The third problem is I think there is if we are willing to short out many of these problems,
private sector has to play a front and center role, but that doesn't happen.
And in many of these countries where we deal with political instability and in governance
is a big issue as well.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: Thank you, Arif.
Inbal, do you have anything add to that?
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef: I'll be very quick.
I couldn't agree more.
And I think building on actually the trust is the longterm commitment.
We see so often these projects that are trying to do this transition into research into operations,
but they're funded to your project and you start to build that trust.
You start to build that relationship and then that project is over.
And so instead of building that trust, you've actually done harm and they're making sure
that you have a longterm commitment to activities and projects and making sure they're really
driven by the users and that there's a longterm plan for sustainability and transitions.
If I had to say one thing.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: Thank you.
And Anastasia, I'll have you have the last word on this question.
Anastasia: Thank you.
I'll answer quick.
I was thinking of some practical, additional ways that we can remove the barriers to adoption.
I see one of them being through these consistent commitment of governmental private bodies,
actually the data collection.
Because this can be so simple if the state government or the national government says,
"Okay, we really care about solving this problem.
And we need to start putting the systems in place, either from the data, from the people
side to collect the data set."
you can always with remote sensing nowadays, come back to analyzing the data, but you need
to have it, you need to have that ground truth local data set that says, "We have gone through
three provinces and this is information we have collected."
And that is of course harder in terms of COVID, but you still have ways to reach people.
And that is something that can be prioritized because the more you want to cover the first
bits of the solution to your local problem, the more you can see it as something you can
really get through.
Anastasia: And it has to be driven of course, by a number
of parties contributing to this.
And we would definitely see more and more incentives for the private sector, more and
more monetizations of the value of what we're speaking about today.
So I think those would be kind of the practical things.
The more good data you can have, the better off you are in the longterm.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: Anastasia, thank you so much.
And by now we have well and truly run out of time.
So as I wrap up, firstly, let me thank our fantastic panel of experts for sharing their
work and unique insights with us, as well as the audience for engaging in a really interesting
discussion.
And I have apologies from Dara who had to step out a little bit early.
But we welcome your questions to keep rolling in.
And as I said, this is really just the start of the dialogue that we need to have.
Minoo Rathnasabapathy: As I mentioned at the start of this webinar,
we will be following up with each of you to fill out a really short survey, to continue
this conversation and learn from each of you what are your priorities?
What are your challenges, opportunities, and actions when looking at the topic of food
security?
And I will also say, please stay tuned for our next webinar in the series, which includes
SDG 16, peace, justice, and strong institutions.
We'll also be tackling STG 7, SDG 3 and others as well.
So this webinar series takes place twice a month and we'll continue to bring together
topical experts to share their perspectives on each of these topics and continue the conversation
with you all on how we can really utilize space data for humanitarian and development
sectors.
I'd also like to give a big thank you to our tech support team and our communications team
who helped put this together.
And I wish you all health, good health, stay well.
And we look forward to continuing this discussion.
Thank you very much.
Dr. Arif Husain: Thank you, well done.
Anastasia: Thank you for having us.
Bye.
Dr. Arif Husain: Bye, well done.
Bye.