The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019

An inclusive, digitally-enabled agricultural transformation could help achieve meaningful livelihood improvements for Africa’s smallholder farmers and pastoralists. It could drive greater engagement in agriculture from women and youth and create employment opportunities along the value chain. At CTA we staked a claim on this power of digitalisation to more systematically transform agriculture early on. Digitalisation, focusing on not individual ICTs but the application of these technologies to entire value chains, is a theme that cuts across all of our work. In youth entrepreneurship, we are fostering a new breed of young ICT ‘agripreneurs’. In climate-smart agriculture multiple projects provide information that can help towards building resilience for smallholder farmers. And in women empowerment we are supporting digital platforms to drive greater inclusion for women entrepreneurs in agricultural value chains

A Logistics Information System Model of Agricultural Product Based on Cloud Computing

Cloud computing technology can play an important role in the various links of agricultural products logistics system, and provide strong technical support for the development of logistics management. The system architecture of agricultural product logistics information system based on cloud computing is drawn in the paper, which include the base layer, service layer, interface layer and user layer. From the perspective of the system functions, the agricultural product logistics information system based on cloud computing is designed to contain six subsystems of the planting management subsystem, process management subsystem, storage management subsystem, transportation management subsystem, order processing subsystem, consumer query subsystem. It has the features of with the help of the RFID technology, cloud computing technology and data mining technology. We decompose the index evaluation system of the agricultural product logistics information system into twelve scheme layers, and use the analytic hierarchy process to determine the weight of the evaluation indexes of each layer

Study on the Development of Rural E-commerce Logistics “Last Kilometer” Awareness Based on the Background of Rural Revitalization

Under the background of rural revitalization, the living standard of farmers in China has been improving, and rural e-commerce is developing rapidly. However, due to the existence of many problems in rural e-commerce logistics, the development of rural e-commerce has been hindered, especially the “last kilometer” of the distribution link, which is a great limitation to the e-commerce industry, logistics industry and farmers themselves. Therefore, this paper provides a full understanding of the rural e-commerce logistics “last kilometer”, and puts forward relevant suggestions on the existing problems

Security and Privacy for Green IoT-based Agriculture: Review, Blockchain solutions, and Challenges

open access articleThis paper presents research challenges on security and privacy issues in the field of green IoT-based agriculture. We start by describing a four-tier green IoT-based agriculture architecture and summarizing the existing surveys that deal with smart agriculture. Then, we provide a classification of threat models against green IoT-based agriculture into five categories, including, attacks against privacy, authentication, confidentiality, availability, and integrity properties. Moreover, we provide a taxonomy and a side-by-side comparison of the state-of-the-art methods toward secure and privacy-preserving technologies for IoT applications and how they will be adapted for green IoT-based agriculture. In addition, we analyze the privacy-oriented blockchain-based solutions as well as consensus algorithms for IoT applications and how they will be adapted for green IoT-based agriculture. Based on the current survey, we highlight open research challenges and discuss possible future research directions in the security and privacy of green IoT-based agriculture

New Trends in Development of Services in the Modern Economy

The services sector strategic development unites a multitude of economic and managerial aspects and is one of the most important problems of economic management. Many researches devoted to this industry study are available. Most of them are performed in the traditional aspect of the voluminous calendar approach to strategic management, characteristic of the national scientific school. Such an approach seems archaic, forming false strategic benchmarks. The services sector is of special scientific interest in this context due to the fact that the social production structure to the services development model attraction in many countries suggests transition to postindustrial economy type where the services sector is a system-supporting sector of the economy. Actively influencing the economy, the services sector in the developed countries dominates in the GDP formation, primary capital accumulation, labor, households final consumption and, finally, citizens comfort of living. However, a clear understanding of the services sector as a hyper-sector permeating all spheres of human activity has not yet been fully developed, although interest in this issue continues to grow among many authors. Target of strategic management of the industry development setting requires substantive content and the services sector target value assessment

Research on optimization and improvement of agricultural supply chain model under the background of “Internet Plus”

“Internet +” technology brings new opportunities for the optimization of agricultural product supply chain model, and constantly promotes the transformation and upgrading of agricultural product production, processing, sales, transportation and other links. With the development of intelligent and digital technology, the online sales of agricultural products have been more optimized and developed. Under the background of “Internet +”, the supply chain of agricultural products should make use of new technologies on the basis of traditional, provide a good environment for the modernization of agricultural product sales, and form an effi cient supply chain system. Based on this, this paper will focus on the optimization and improvement of agricultural product supply chain model under the background of “Internet +”

Internet+ Logistics in Chinese Non-Timber Forest Products Online Stores

Electronic commerce (E-commerce) has become an international phenomena nowadays. Especially in China, due to the country’s size, large population and culture, the consumption-driven economic growth plays a more fundamental role than in many other countries, which gives higher requirements for the development of modern logistics. The rapid development of Chinese e-commerce, has made online shopping a very important part in people’s daily life as it is cheaper and more convenient than to buy things from traditional stores. At the same time, the Chinese government gives strong support to E-commerce in its economic development strategy. In March 2015 an E-commerce idea called Internet Plus (Internet+) was officially announced by the Chinese Prime Minister as an important government business strategy in the future economic development plan. The idea does not only aim to develop a new type of economics, but also to improve the traditional economics. The new strategy can decrease enterprises’ cost and increase overall operating efficiency. Behind the high development speed of the e-commerce, logistics is a very important factor to ensure the success of the online business and it is necessary to realize which factors under E-commerce Logistics takes the biggest part and has the most weight among all logistics features. In this study, I will concentrate on Internet+ Logistics, which derived from E-commerce Logistics. Evaluate the logistics performance of 364 online none timber forest products (NTFPs) stores from Alibaba online shopping mall names Tmall. The study can be seen as complete and conceptual, both in the academic and the practical field. By using entropy weight method, Topsis analysis and cross analysis, I analyze the weights of different levels indexes in Internet+ Logistics performance and also get total scores and ranking of sample online stores, in order to understand the important factors and the development trend in Internet+ Logistics. My study reveals, that some indexes such as service can largely influence the performance of online store logistics, which are the most important elements of Internet+ Logistics. The proposed framework enriches the theory of network marketing and gives directions to business owners to make improvements on the logistics quality of their online stores

Potential Impact of Industry 4.0 in Sustainable Food Supply Chain Environment

Integration of suitable supply chain system with the industry 4.0 in the face of the evolving sustainability consciousness is of paramount importance to engineering and manufacturing industry at large; this is gradually becoming an irresistible option to manage production effectively and with high efficiency in engineering and manufacturing sector. Industry 4.0 also referred to as “smart factory” enables to address issues such as food safety, security, control, perishability, competitive pressure, demand predictions etc. within the food manufacturing aspects. The paper examines the challenges and opportunities towards the advancement of technology and that of industry 4.0 implications towards sustainability and more closely on sustainable food supply chain environments

Contextual impacts on industrial processes brought by the digital transformation of manufacturing: a systematic review

The digital transformation of manufacturing (a phenomenon also known as "Industry 4.0" or "Smart Manufacturing") is finding a growing interest both at practitioner and academic levels, but is still in its infancy and needs deeper investigation. Even though current and potential advantages of digital manufacturing are remarkable, in terms of improved efficiency, sustainability, customization, and flexibility, only a limited number of companies has already developed ad hoc strategies necessary to achieve a superior performance. Through a systematic review, this study aims at assessing the current state of the art of the academic literature regarding the paradigm shift occurring in the manufacturing settings, in order to provide definitions as well as point out recurring patterns and gaps to be addressed by future research. For the literature search, the most representative keywords, strict criteria, and classification schemes based on authoritative reference studies were used. The final sample of 156 primary publications was analyzed through a systematic coding process to identify theoretical and methodological approaches, together with other significant elements. This analysis allowed a mapping of the literature based on clusters of critical themes to synthesize the developments of different research streams and provide the most representative picture of its current state. Research areas, insights, and gaps resulting from this analysis contributed to create a schematic research agenda, which clearly indicates the space for future evolutions of the state of knowledge in this field