Our latest episode is with David Davies, the founder of AgUnity, which is using smartphone technology to combat poverty and reduce FLW among smallholder farmers and their communities. David shares opportunities for tapping into digital and traceability technology to reduce FLW. We explore a case study of how digital technology can facilitate “triple wins” of increasing access to safe and nutritious food, safeguarding farmer livelihoods and profits, and reducing methane emissions by improving traceability across multiple agricultural supply chains. More information on AgUnity can be found in this short video.
Our latest episode is with David Davies, the founder of AgUnity, which is using smartphone technology to combat poverty and reduce FLW among smallholder farmers and their communities. David shares opportunities for tapping into digital and traceability technology to reduce FLW. We explore a case study of how digital technology can facilitate “triple wins” of increasing access to safe and nutritious food, safeguarding farmer livelihoods and profits, and reducing methane emissions by improving traceability across multiple agricultural supply chains. More information on AgUnity can be found in this short video.
(gentle music)- Welcome to USAID's Kitchen Sink, A Food Loss and Waste Podcast. I'm your producer, Nika Larian. 30 to 40% of the food that is produced is either lost or wasted, contributing to a global food crisis with over 800 million going to bed hungry. Listen on as USAID experts speak with researchers and development professionals to explore solutions to this critical issue that demands a kitchen sink approach. When it comes to climate, food security, and food system sustainability, we have no time to waste. Thanks for tuning in to USAID's Kitchen Sink, A Food Loss and Waste Podcast. My name is Nika Larian, food loss and waste advisor at the US Agency for International Development and producer of USAID's Kitchen Sink. Today I will be speaking with David Davies, CEO and founder of AgUnity. We will be discussing the role of technology, particularly traceability tech, and addressing food loss and waste. Welcome, David, please introduce yourself.- Thank you, Nika. Yeah, I'm really pleased to be on the show. I'm David Davies, and I'm the founder of AgUnity. And what AgUnity does is take really simple, low-cost smartphones, and we adapt them to suit the half a billion smallest lowest income farmers in the most remote regions of the world, and we work everywhere from Ethiopia to Papua New Guinea, helping kind of give farmers a pathway out of poverty into some form of prosperity.- Excellent, thanks for joining us today. I know digital technology is a big priority at USAID, so I'm interested to dive deeper into the link with food loss and waste. So let's dive into our questions, starting off with, at USAID, we are emphasizing the triple wins of addressing food loss and waste. Can you share an example of how AgUnity is reducing lost and waste with concurring impacts on nutrition and food security, economic development, as well as sustainable food systems?- Sure. I can actually give kind of a positive and a negative example of that one. So we've done a wonderful project in Kenya with Virginia Tech and supported by USAID, and the whole point of that project was to help the local farmers who were producing traditional African indigenous vegetables to get them into the city.'Cause what's happened is, as cities like Nairobi have grown bigger and bigger, the people that used to eat those very nutritious and healthy foods can't get 'em anymore. They don't get to the right market, or they don't get into the supermarket chains. And so we ran a project that just enabled the really smallholder farmers, and I mean these are farmers with an acre of land. We enabled them to produce, to be able to record what they had. And what was so interesting about that is the supply chain just solved themselves. Once the information was there, people were getting those to the right markets where they knew people were selling 'em. People in the city were buying these vegetables that they possibly hadn't eaten in years, which are infinitely more nutritious. The farmers made a lot more money, but then something really fantastic happened. The farmers actually discovered that there was premium and normal grades of these produce, and previously they were just producing it as quickly and easily as they could. Suddenly, they found out they could get 50% more if they produced really high grade vegetables. And within, almost immediately, all they were doing is producing the high-grade vegetables, which are much easier to sell, spoil less, and so what happens is, when you've got a continuous data flowing through the supply chain, problems tend to solve themselves. What's so interesting about this is AgUnity's done projects in developed markets where we've done similar sorts of traceability from farm to fork solutions. And in the really low income farmers, we've kinda left them behind. We're solving this all in the developed world, but our very low-income farmers, they produce food for over half the world, and we can't forget about them. So we need to have systems that work for them as well. So I was also recently in Ethiopia, and I kind of saw the tragic reversal of this situation. We work on a number of projects in Ethiopia, mostly with coffee farmers, and we were around Addis, the capital city in Ethiopia. We noticed that, like in a restaurant, there was a mural of like beautiful scenery looking out where the restaurant was, and it was all diverse farms growing local vegetables. We went and spoke to the farmers, and they said that,"Look, they can't grow local vegetables anymore." Almost that whole landscape that we could see from the restaurant from a decade ago had now turned into grain crops, and that's because noodles and rice are cheaper in the markets than the really good food that farmers could be producing. And instead of Ethiopians relying on their own production, they're buying packeted noodles that have come in from overseas, which are vastly different in nutrition. And again, I think it's a similar problem to Kenya. I think if you give them digital technology and basic traceability, those crops will be getting into, the farmers will be making good money, the people will be eating healthier, so it's a win-win for everyone basically. This is very possible- Definitely the role of those traditional markets cannot be understated in low and middle income countries. So we really wanna make sure that the availability and access to safe and nutritious food is abundant in those markets, and it's not going to waste. So moving on to our next question. What is the opportunity for traceability technology in reducing food loss and waste?- Yeah, fortunately, we've had a number of forays into this. traceability is critical. We work all over the world in developing communities, and it would stagger you, the amount of food that just goes to waste. We work in cacao a lot for chocolate. And of the very smallholder farmers, I'd estimate that at least half of it never gets to market. There's systemic supply chain inabilities there, but then also once it gets into the supply chain in things like coffee, and cocoa, and particularly the smaller projects, you see an incredible amount of waste. The problem is the people buying those produce don't necessarily know where it's come from, and so there's no way to fix the problems. And as we saw in Kenya, those problems are easy to fix with just a little bit of the reward coming the right way, but what you need is a very, very open system. There's lots of solutions around traceability out there, probably hundreds of different companies doing it, but they all tend to be kind of bespoken, lock in the customer like,"You're gonna use our devices and we'll sell you the data." One of the fortunate things is I used to work in investment banking and Goldman Sachs, and Lehman, and others, and I was a global head of market data. And rather than trying to reinvent the wheel for the food industry, one way of looking at this is look at who else has solved it. And interestingly, in banking, Bloomberg, firstly, Telerate, and then Reuters and Bloomberg have solved this problem very efficiently. The need is not so much to have a solution. There's tons of IT devices. The problem is everyone uses different ones, so what you need is that data marketplace, which is what's been created by Bloomberg and Reuters, and the banking industry all revolves around that. And because it's so central to their way of making money, they've refined it really well. So we've got a (indistinct) for how traceability and data should move in the food industry. It should be the case that one of our small coffee farmers can say, "Look, I'm farming organically or I'm using regenerative, or I'm sequestering carbon." They can put that data somewhere. We can put a tracking device in the thing. And when that coffee bag turns up in Japan, who might not even know where it's come from, they can say, "Oh, this is sustainably sourced coffee or I can reward the farmer." All sorts of possibilities come, but it needs to be an open system. That's, I think, the key to any traceability solution.- That's a great point, David. And there's some obvious utility in traceability tech to food safety as well. And as we say at USAID, safe food is saved food. So I think you really stress the importance of getting those data out there and easily accessible. One last question for you, David. How do we make the business case for implementing these technologies? Is the business case different for smallholder farmers versus larger corporations and multinationals?- Yeah, it's very different, and that's why AgUnity doesn't directly move into the tracing part of it because that's a very different sort of relationship that you've gotta have with say a commercial customer. We've been involved in that many times, and we think that's a different sort of organization that needs to feed up to them, because what they wanna do is buy the data. On the other hand, you have the smallholder farmers, and that's where AgUnity... Our purpose in the world is to help millions of small farmers lift themselves outta poverty. One way we can do that is, of course, by making 'em more efficient and getting 'em better prices, but also if they can contribute the data or information about what they're doing into a platform and get paid for that, that's another way we can feed more income back to those farmers. And so that's why I think there's two sides to this. There's one that collects and supports the farmers and make sure they've got a way of telling what they've done. Because one of the main thing, one of the very interesting things we see is when farmers are only earning a couple of dollars a day, it only takes a really small incentive to get them to do lots of different things, like, for example sequester farm and regenerate, put data on of what their family's doing, make sure their kids are eating properly. Those little motivations are actually really easy to encourage. And those are the things that if passed along the supply chain, so people can see at the other end, that really does make you sustainably sourced coffee, your cocoa, your roses, all those things that are produced in developing countries. People on the other side of the world can know where they're produced, know that they're safe. Because if there's a problem, we can find where the problem's going on and fix it fairly easily. And also, know that they're produced healthily and the people behind it are improving their lives, which is I'm sure what everyone in the world would like to see.- Definitely. Well, I appreciate you making the business case for us because we can create all of these amazing innovations and new technologies, but if businesses don't see the economic benefit of implementing them, oftentimes they aren't used to their fullest capacity. So I think it's important to really focus on not only the benefits to the consumer, but also the benefits to the business for improving food safety, food system sustainability, as well as reducing food loss and waste. Well, thank you David for joining us today. This was a very interesting conversation and I really appreciated learning more about the work that AgUnity is doing.- Thank you so much, Nika, for having us on the podcast.(upbeat music)- [Nika] Thank you for tuning in to USAID's Kitchen Sink. This podcast was produced by Nika Larian and is organized by the USAID Food Loss and Waste Community of Practice Co-chairs Ahmed Kablan and Ann Vaughan. Additional thanks goes to Feed the Future, the US government's global food security initiative, and the USAID Center for Nutrition.(upbeat music)