Can ICT solutions for agriculture help to avoid social and economic problems during a pandemic crisis?
There is no end in sight to the global COVID-19 pandemic yet, but the virus is already creating its impact on local and global food supply chains. The current crisis will likely cause food shortages and high prices for consumers. The incomes of farmers and all those working in the food and agriculture sector are also at risk. “We have to rethink our whole food supply ecosystem!
The world after Corona will be different! How can ICT solutions contribute to avoiding the problems of social disruption during a pandemic crisis? ICT can enhance and secure supply chains for the production of agricultural produce for local and international businesses and play a critical role to mitigate – and shorten – the effects of a pandemic!”, according to Berlin-based Dr. Robert Daubner, a digitalization, and innovation specialist.
Is smart tech helping to solve the problems caused by pandemic events?
Well-designed ERPs or enterprise resources planning platforms, for the agricultural sector, offer unique opportunities to manage remotely critical services such as extension services, spray alerts, weather forecasting, yield forecasting, mobile payments, access to inputs, input finance, seed distribution, and so on between farmers and the staff of aggregators – such as farmer cooperatives, food processors and agricultural commodity traders. “We were worried about how to distribute seeds in time for the planting season now we can’t go to the farmers and the rains have started already.
However, in the end, it took us only a matter of days to distribute seed to hundreds of farmer groups via the local busses and matatus. We coordinated it with the area chiefs, farmer leaders and farmers, and of course, the local ministry of agriculture, all via bulk SMS and management reports from eProd. We must have actually saved money and I can imagine that we will continue working more and more remotely, also when Coronavirus is beaten”, according to Michael Maina, Production Manager at Equator Kenya Ltd in Malindi, Kenya, which has used eProd since 2004.
eProd offers an affordable and proven ERP for managing supply chains used in more than 20 agricultural value chains, three continents, and 10 countries, and its 75 clients source from about 250,000 small-scale farmers. The platform is available in the languages: English, French, Spanish, Kiswahili, Kinyarwanda, Amharic, Tigrinya, Pashto, and Dari, and soon also Arabic. Please contact us incase you would like to learn how eProd can assist your enterprise. Info@eprod-solutions.com