Ministry of Information Technology and Telecom (MoIT) along with the Food and Agriculture Organization of UN (FAO) launched a national call for industry 4.0 centric solutions that address the current challenges being faced by the agriculture sector in Pakistan including water shortage, food security, nutrition and others.

The AgriSurge Innovation Challenge (AIC) is an Open Innovation Challenge seeking to transform agriculture sector in the country through groundbreaking ideas to meet the growing challenges with new solutions submitted by inspiring individuals and teams – of students, professionals, entrepreneurs, startups, and ordinary citizen innovators. AIC aims to ignite innovation to enhance the agricultural productivity of the country using 4IR technologies of AI and Big Data to help feed the growing population.

The objective of the AIC is to support the brilliant ideas from the talented innovators by providing them conducive environment and resources including funding, mentorship, incubation and etc. to make agriculture development more rapid, more inclusive, and more resilient.

https://ignite.org.pk/agrisurge/

• Pakistan

• The poor
• Remote and rural communities

Agriculture sector is the mainstay of Pakistan’s economy as it contributes around 20 percent in the overall gross domestic product (GDP) and is also a big source of employment. It helps meet the food requirement of ever increasing population, providing raw materials to all the major industrial sectors including textiles, leather, sugar, flour milling etc., and has a significant role in poverty alleviation and rural development. Low growth, water shortage, environmental concerns, volatile energy prices, rising expectations from consumers – these are some of the complex challenges the agriculture sector is facing today, along with diminishing production profit margins for farmers. Innovation is playing a key role in addressing the challenges at a greater scale. To grow the food Pakistan and the world needs, innovative crop production systems to produce more in an environmentally, economically and socially viable way. Global agriculture is increasingly driven by data. Advances in computing algorithms and processing power, data storage, and networks over the last few decades have given rise to powerful tools for helping make agriculture more precise, profitable, and adaptive. Newer digital innovations — including artificial intelligence, the expansion of connected sensor technologies, and robotics — promise more promising changes in the farming landscape in the near future. However, digital agriculture in Pakistan has not realized its full potential. Despite some promotion from the government and industry, to date, the real rates of adoption of data-driven agriculture have been slow. There is a strong requirement to introduce the precision and smart agriculture based upon the data-driven farming at the primary level especially when the low-size farm holdings are on the higher side in the country.