A call for opening up of agriculture related research and data has been made by the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative. The relatively new campaign group (it was established a year after the 2012 G8 summit) has over 363 partners from national governments, non-governmental, international and private sector organisations.
The concern is that by 2050 the global population will reach nine billion people. Today 800 million people struggle to acquire enough food and suffer with hunger; by 2050 that figure will increase significantly. Although small-scale strategies are being worked on to address this, higher level planning and joined-up thinking is impossible without a global, comprehensive picture. And such a picture can only come from the sharing of mass data. As an example of how such an initiative might work, shared satellite data was used to improve food security in Indonesia, providing a service to over 200,000 smallholders.
GODAN is seeking “proactive sharing of open data to make information about agriculture and nutrition available, accessible and usable to deal with the urgent challenge of ensuring world food security.” To promote this cause the body has launched a petition and it is seeking one million signatures and to present these to scientists, both government sponsored and those working in the private sector. The petition will be handed over to the United Nations in New York City.
Explaining more about the imitative to the BBC, GODAN spokeswoman Natasha Mudhar outlines: “Open data is to innovation in agriculture and nutrition, and hence promoting food security, by improving farming methods, enhancing food production and providing better information and advice.”
