Towards Caribbean e-Agriculture

"Despite high mobile penetration in Caribbean developing nations, using ICTs for business activities is still an obstacle for many smallholders in the agricultural sector," according to Mr. Antoine and Mr. Phillips.

Even though the Caribbean region has displayed mobile phone penetration advancements -  some islands achieving 166%, compared with 128% in Europe, 104% in the United States and 76% in China - full use of ICTs in business activities are currently achieving lower numbers. The Caribbean government and economic planners are concern about this growing trend according to "Towards Caribbean e-Agriculture". 

The current challenges associated with this trend are:

1. Awareness - " smallholder and subsistence farmers in the Caribbean are often unaware of existing ICT services...Few of the farmers in the region have smartphones that can access online services, so SMS-based applications may be more useful to farmers who either do not have smartphones or are not inclined to uptake data and mobile internet packages."
2. Targeting - "agricultural market reports and analyses tend be geared more to researchers, academics and managers of large operations than to small farmers and agri-business operators. The challenge is to encourage these service providers to provide more customised content, and in media formats that are most familiar to the majority of agricultural stakeholders."

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The article continues by stating the need to address the challenges. One solution that is available is education/ training:

• Web 2.0 for Agriculture training is available in the Caribbean region. This training session is hosted by The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation and is delivered by INFOCOMM Technologies Limited. Participants are trained in the following key areas: RSS feeds and alerts, wikis, Google docs, VoIP, online mapping, online publishing, blogging and social media.

 To read more, please click the link provided: Towards Caribbean e-Agriculture