Global open data in agriculture and nutrition (Godan) initiative partner network analysis

Background: Ensuring healthy, safe and nutritious food for everyone is a global concern. Accessing the information to make the correct decisions regarding food security can be challenging. Open data has been shown to help solve practical problems related to agriculture and nutrition, enabling effective decision-making. In order to create a global data ecosystem that benefits everyone, a wide range of stakeholders must be included in the conversations. The GODAN initiative involves a network of over 500 partner organizations committed to open data in agriculture and nutrition. Methods: We analysed data from a survey of the partner organizations, with 225 respondents, to determine open data activities, including challenges, use of open data, stakeholder involvement and future directions. Respondents were asked a variety of free text and multiple choice questions. Results: 160 partners had at least one open data activity, 65 did not, or did not know. Of the 160, 36 had a second activity. Overall, GODAN partners are developing 200 open data activities. Agriculture is the most common focus for an open data activity. Nutrition-only activities are strongly underrepresented. The most frequently mentioned challenge was cost, which is linked to data governance, management, and human capacity; many do not have the funding to begin or maintain open data activities. Conclusions: The most common challenges were the ones related to the data itself, including how to access it, manage it, and how to keep the sensitive data secure. GODAN is already focusing on these issues through the Responsible Data and Data Ownership pieces. Capacity building, and empowering partners with the tools they need to act, is one of the most effective actions available for GODAN. Funding for open data, as well as research to create more sustainable business models, should be the focus of the open data agenda.</p

Sustainable Sourcing of Global Agricultural Raw Materials: Assessing Gaps in Key Impact and Vulnerability Issues and Indicators.

Understanding how to source agricultural raw materials sustainably is challenging in today's globalized food system given the variety of issues to be considered and the multitude of suggested indicators for representing these issues. Furthermore, stakeholders in the global food system both impact these issues and are themselves vulnerable to these issues, an important duality that is often implied but not explicitly described. The attention given to these issues and conceptual frameworks varies greatly--depending largely on the stakeholder perspective--as does the set of indicators developed to measure them. To better structure these complex relationships and assess any gaps, we collate a comprehensive list of sustainability issues and a database of sustainability indicators to represent them. To assure a breadth of inclusion, the issues are pulled from the following three perspectives: major global sustainability assessments, sustainability communications from global food companies, and conceptual frameworks of sustainable livelihoods from academic publications. These terms are integrated across perspectives using a common vocabulary, classified by their relevance to impacts and vulnerabilities, and categorized into groups by economic, environmental, physical, human, social, and political characteristics. These issues are then associated with over 2,000 sustainability indicators gathered from existing sources. A gap analysis is then performed to determine if particular issues and issue groups are over or underrepresented. This process results in 44 "integrated" issues--24 impact issues and 36 vulnerability issues--that are composed of 318 "component" issues. The gap analysis shows that although every integrated issue is mentioned at least 40% of the time across perspectives, no issue is mentioned more than 70% of the time. A few issues infrequently mentioned across perspectives also have relatively few indicators available to fully represent them. Issues in the impact framework generally have fewer gaps than those in the vulnerability framework

Big data in agriculture and nutrition

The food system community sees a huge potential for big data in agriculture to lift farmers out of poverty (Patel, 2013), and ensure that parents can feed their children nutritious, diverse foods (Lung’aho, 2018). In the USA, venture capitalists spent US$3 billion on ‘agtech’ (digital technology in agriculture) in 2016, with 46% of investors focusing on big data and analytics (Walker et al., 2016). Large data initiatives such as the CGIAR’s Big Data in Agriculture Platform have made thousands of datasets and publications available (Pineda, 2018). In order to establish a global data ecosystem that yields powerful insights and recommendations on the ways in which agriculture can improve nutrition, the community must ensure that the benefits of big data are for the betterment of all and not only for the few.PRIFPRI2DGO; CP

Measuring the value of data governance in agricultural investments: A case study

Summary The study at hand measures the value of improving data governance and access in the Supporting Soil Health Interventions (SSHI) project in Ethiopia. We applied two separate but interlinked models, one qualitative and one quantitative, to create a new framework enhancing the traditional cost-benefit analysis. The qualitative analysis provided novel insights into the specific types of value and the mechanisms through which they are generated. These results underpinned the development of an innovative framework to measure this perceived value quantitatively. By combining the quantitative and qualitative framework, the study demonstrated that it is possible to generate plausible and credible quantitative estimates of both costs and benefits of data governance and access. While acknowledging that the estimates are only illustrative, the case study results suggested on a direct cost measure, at a particular point in time, the SSHI data governance activities yielded a negative return. However, indirect social and public benefits are rarely quantified, but this paper shows that relatively few "indirect"benefits (current but unmeasured, or measurable but in the future) are necessary to reverse that view, at least from the point of the economy more generally

Sustainable Sourcing of Global Agricultural Raw Materials: Assessing Gaps in Key Impact and Vulnerability Issues and Indicators.

Understanding how to source agricultural raw materials sustainably is challenging in today's globalized food system given the variety of issues to be considered and the multitude of suggested indicators for representing these issues. Furthermore, stakeholders in the global food system both impact these issues and are themselves vulnerable to these issues, an important duality that is often implied but not explicitly described. The attention given to these issues and conceptual frameworks varies greatly--depending largely on the stakeholder perspective--as does the set of indicators developed to measure them. To better structure these complex relationships and assess any gaps, we collate a comprehensive list of sustainability issues and a database of sustainability indicators to represent them. To assure a breadth of inclusion, the issues are pulled from the following three perspectives: major global sustainability assessments, sustainability communications from global food companies, and conceptual frameworks of sustainable livelihoods from academic publications. These terms are integrated across perspectives using a common vocabulary, classified by their relevance to impacts and vulnerabilities, and categorized into groups by economic, environmental, physical, human, social, and political characteristics. These issues are then associated with over 2,000 sustainability indicators gathered from existing sources. A gap analysis is then performed to determine if particular issues and issue groups are over or underrepresented. This process results in 44 "integrated" issues--24 impact issues and 36 vulnerability issues--that are composed of 318 "component" issues. The gap analysis shows that although every integrated issue is mentioned at least 40% of the time across perspectives, no issue is mentioned more than 70% of the time. A few issues infrequently mentioned across perspectives also have relatively few indicators available to fully represent them. Issues in the impact framework generally have fewer gaps than those in the vulnerability framework

Most and least mentioned Integrated Issues across perspectives (top and bottom 25%).

<p>Most and least mentioned Integrated Issues across perspectives (top and bottom 25%).</p

Number of fully-covered component issues for each integrated issue.

<p>See <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0128752#pone.0128752.s005" target="_blank">S4 Dataset.csv</a> for a full list of component issues.</p

Forty-four integrated sustainability issues (24 impact and 36 vulnerability).

<p>See Information B in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0128752#pone.0128752.s001" target="_blank">S1 File</a> for detailed descriptions of each integrated issue.</p

Number of related indicators per integrated issue.

<p>Number of related indicators per integrated issue.</p

Integrated issues linked to sources by perspective.

<p>Each link represents an individual source that mentions the issue. Size of node (and text) corresponds to the number of links. Issue nodes are distributed using a force-directed algorithm (Force Atlas 2 using Gephi 0.8.2) and hence closest to perspectives with which they share the most links. See <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0128752#pone.0128752.s004" target="_blank">S3 Dataset.csv</a> for data on each individual source and their issue links.</p