Page 7 - Digital Agriculture: A Standards Snapshot

Foreword – ITU

Technological progress is the driving force for better health,
longer life expectancies, and Earth’s ability to sustain its grow-
ing population. With 9.7 billion people expected to share our
planet by 2050, new technologies must continue helping farm-
ers to produce more with less.
Innovations in areas like artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet
of Things (IoT), drones, and robotics hold great promise to
improve the precision and sustainability of farming techniques.
Farmers can now make decisions at the level of a single square
metre or individual plant or animal, creating key improvements
to agricultural sustainability.
With the aim of creating global access to these “digital agricul-
ture” innovations, ITU and FAO have laid groundwork for new
international standards with our Focus Group on AI and IoT for
Digital Agriculture.
This publication highlights the motivations for the group’s work and provides context for its
outcomes.
Open to all interested experts, the focus group concluded its work in June 2024 with the delivery
of a standardization roadmap, terminology, analyses of agri-tech use cases, and guidance on ethics
as well as data collection and modelling.
Our standards roadmap sets the course for future work and our glossary provides an essential
foundation for continued research and standardization.
The latest agri-tech innovations are detailed by our report on tech use cases for optimizing farming
practices, crop management, and resource use and sustainability, as well as our report on sensors,
drones, and other smart tech to gather data for real-time analysis by AI algorithms. We have also
outlined ethical, legal, and regulatory considerations for data privacy, transparency, and fairness in
agricultural AI systems with our report predicated on the European Union’s AI Act, the Rome Call
for AI Ethics, and the UN Resolution on AI.
I thank and applaud the dedicated experts from around the world that contributed to our focus
group for bringing life to these outcomes.
Recognizing the many challenges still to be overcome, ITU and FAO continue working together
to build bridges between different areas of expertise and stimulate the collaboration required for
digital agriculture to achieve global impact.
I welcome you to join us.

Seizo Onoe
Director, Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB)
International Telecommunication Union (ITU)

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