 I'd like to welcome you to this special session, this showcase session on using data for food system resiliency. Thanks for joining us. My name is Lisa Schrader, and I'll be your moderator today. I'm the director of Mercy Corps Agrifin Programming in Africa. We work with about 130 different organizations across Africa to try to harness technology to reach smallholder farmers. We have over this COVID crisis been working very closely with the World Economic Forum's working group on data. As our programming has reached about eight and a half million farmers with COVID messaging and different forms of services. So we're really thrilled to be part of this session and these great panels. What we're gonna be focusing on today in this session is the potential and the transformative nature of data to help us drive more efficient equitable food systems to help us become more resilient in the face of crises like COVID-19 and other crises that we know will be hitting. We have an amazing panel today that is gonna be talking to us about the potential for data and how it's been used across COVID and how it can be used moving forward toward our goals. And I'd like to go ahead and kick off the session. Okay, so how we'd like to start this is really with some feedback from you. And we've got a slide, let's see if I can refer you to the chat, here we go. We'd like to hear a little bit about your sense and your experience through COVID-19 and how it's impacted you personally when it comes to access and matters of food. So first we'd like you to go to slido.com and type in the hashtag of SDIS or just use your smartphone to capture that QR code in the corner and let us know in one word how was your experience, how has COVID-19 affected you personally as we've been working through this last pandemic crisis and the area of food systems. And while you're doing that, let me go ahead and highlight a resource that we'd like to bring to your attention, which is the culmination of the working groups, Work at World Economic Forum on data and food system resiliency in a time of COVID. If you look over in the Zoom webinar chat, you'll see a link to using data for food system resilience. And we really recommend that you have a look at that brand new piece of work. And then I'll go ahead and while we're waiting for the results to come through from slido, just quickly introduce our panel. We have a great group of actors here of important food system actors from around the world. Sven Tor from Yara, the CEO of Yara. Phillip Tigo, who is a senior advisor on data and food systems to the Kenyan government. Stuart Oda, who is the founder and chief executive officer of Alaska Life based in Asia and Ishmael Sunga, who is the chief executive officer of the Southern Africa Confederation of Agricultural Unions, which essentially brings together all of our farmer associations across Southern Africa. So we've got a really great group here today to have a discussion. What we'll be doing is running through some panel questions first for the group and then we'll be opening up to questions and answers from you. So we'd like to encourage you to use the chat function to send any questions you may have our way for the panel and we'll use the last 15 minutes of this session to discuss your questions. So please feel free to dive in with us and let me just see if our Slido results have come through yet. Looks like, so again, if you can just enter your one word, okay. How COVID-19 has impacted you personally when it comes to food. Okay, so what do we see? Interesting, shocked. I think a lot of us were. And then we're looking at access, access to food. I think that through the COVID crisis, certainly here in East Africa where I'm based, we experienced a huge train wreck of markets being closed, of transportation being shut down, of major cities being closed off to agricultural markets. It was very, very disruptive. I'm looking at this cooking at home. We were all cooking at home and thinking about how we can meet our needs at home since we weren't able to go to restaurants. It's interesting to look and see what we're talking about about access, how to reach resources, hard to buy bread and then different kinds of insights around really needing reliable access and being grateful for what we've got. So I think that we have just gone through and still going through quite a shock to our food systems. And what we'd like to do is talk with our panel now through a series of questions about what their experience has been through this and the role of data in transforming and making our food systems more resilient. So I'll go ahead and kick off our first question to the group. And my first question is, when COVID-19 hit you and your companies, your organizations in the food system, what data was really critical, became critical to you and to drive your response and what data was missing? And maybe we'll go ahead and lead off with Spendtor. And as many of you know, as the CEO of Yara, Yara is reaching 20 million farmers around the world, working in more than 160 countries in food systems. So Spendtor, what would you say your experience has been through COVID? What did you need and what was missing? Well, thank you, Lisa. And just to explain what we were actually doing is that Yara is a company that produces plant nutrition, which is a key component for farmers out there. And even if we have operations and colleagues in Wuhan and so we had some time to prepare what hit us in March and the scale of it was bigger than what we thought. So we made two very clear top priorities and that would be health and safety of our employees. And also number two was to support local governments to stop the spread of the virus. But the one data point that really kept us going and kept me awake at night was the rough instead study that so that if you don't get nitrogen fertilizer out to the farmers, the reduction in crop yield would be 43%. And in March, then you're right at the peak of the planting season in many parts of the world where we operate. So if we didn't get our product out, it would have a huge impact to food security. So we were gathering data around the infection rates in different countries, data from our plants on how they were operating and close borders. We have 20 some plants that are 60 countries where we operate but we sell to 160 countries. So we're crossing borders all the time how do we actually get the product out to the farmers and how do we actually get supplies into our plant? So it was first part of this was just making sure we kept our company running and kept the supply chains open. And we were able to do that for the first few months. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Let me go ahead and move the question, the same question to our second speaker, Philip Tigo who's an advisor to the Kenyan government and I know was front and center in response across the government with data. Philip, what was your experience with COVID-19? What data did you need and what was missing? And you're on mute. You're on mute. You have to be on mute. I got it. Thank you. Being a country, not a company, of course it's a different situation. It's the extent that we are dealing with the whole nation. So I think a couple of things. I think the first bucket of data, of the challenges we saw was availability and accessibility of food and water. So that was quite critical. The second piece of course was support to farmers and farmers could be pastoralists, fisher folks through the cross valley chain. The third bit of course was agriculture inputs, outputs, but also issues of value addition. So those were the big things. Secondly, as you know, COVID hit us quite hard and we know the frequency of how we collect some of these data sets were also disrupted. So we realized that we kind of have a challenge across the whole data value chain. And so we just decided to prioritize and the priorities were really around staples. And so to ensure that we at least ensure that staples are available, especially with differentiated lockdowns. And so for us, the food balance sheet, as you know, was key and we're thinking through how do we ensure that we can move through a response mechanism to a more resiliency strategy so that next time we can respond faster. Thank you very much. I mean, you know, we were a small part of that food security war that Phillip helped manage in Kenya that brought together dozens of hundreds of actors and trying to put together that data quilt. So the Kenyan government could make sure that there wasn't enough food to feed this country was quite an incredible process. Let me go ahead and move now to Mr. Ishmael Sunga. As we noted before, Ishmael, oh, sorry, I just unmuted myself. Ishmael leads the association of farmers associations across all of Southern Africa from Tanzania all the way down to South Africa. So it's a huge farmer facing footprint. And Mr. Sunga, from your perspective, how did COVID-19 hit your organizations? What did you need and what was missing? Thank you, Lisa. Instinctively, when I hit with a crisis of this nature, which was a health pandemic, the instinct really was to get very worried and concerned going to panic mode about health issues, your safety, your personal safety. It was no longer about agriculture. It was about whether you as an individual, not as a farmer, as an individual, you were safe. And you needed information that would assure you that you were safe and that you will be safe. Let alone safe to go and farming. Farming became initially a secondary issue. It was about me and my family as a farmer. Then the second point really was that information that could reassure farmers in their human being nature, not as farmers, was that there were multiple sources, fragmented sources of information about what actually was happening, which some of which was contradictory, some of which was not verifiable, but there was not time for that. So you got hold of any piece of information, verifiable, credible or not, and go for it. What lesson is coming out of this really is that in a situation of crisis, information becomes perhaps only two that will manage to see you through, agricultural wise and as a human being. So that's a fundamental point. And unfortunately, that system of provisioning of information to guarantee safety and then to guarantee that you will be able to harvest to agriculture was not readily available, which became of course a serious issue in terms of compromising for security. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, I think that's hitting on that need for credible information across all of our companies. Our last panelist for this question is Mr. Stuart Oda, who's the founder and CEO of Alaska Life based out of Japan, China, Singapore, working on tech innovation and coming up with new ways to support farm practice. So Stuart, what was your experience of COVID-19 in your company and with your partners in Asia and what did you need and what were you missing? Yeah, thank you very much for having me. Corona, the crisis was quite unique for us. We were actually in the middle of a deployment in the Middle East. So moving our products and information around getting our products through customs and to see if the borders are even open to move our products through some of the most basic logistical data points were actually missing. And so from a product deployment perspective, these were some of the challenges that we're facing. And on a more kind of practical level, we're also operating our own indoor farm here in Beijing and information about how our customers are doing was very, very hard to come by. And so we were growing produce with the assumption that we would be able to deliver them to many of the hotel customers that rely on our products on a daily basis. And what we found out was that many of their operations due to government regulation were forced to shut down. And so as soon as we figured that out, we were able to kind of quickly pivot and take our entire commercial operation as well as the employees that were operating our farms and turn our entire operation to focus on R&D. So we were able to develop an enormous number of new products and components and test them through the past six months. And we're quite excited about a lot of the progress that we were able to make on the product development side. And so while there was some challenges and while it was disruptive from sales and a normal operational perspective, in terms of kind of coming out of this crisis and the products that we were able to develop and the kind of strides that we were able to make in terms of our efficiencies was very, very exciting. And it was great to see kind of the team across so many countries that we operate in to kind of come together to support each other in these efforts. Thanks so much, Stuart. I think that that is a great segue into our next round of questions, which is really about the opportunities. So data is progressively being used to help organizations make decisions, make better decisions, reach their partners, their farmers and gather information and develop new products and services. So I think the next question is for each one of you, what are the opportunities that you see to leverage data to build greater resilience moving forward in the food systems? And maybe I'll go ahead and ask Ishmael to go ahead and go first on that question. Around a minute each. Thank you, Lisa. If there's ever a good thing to come out of this crisis for farmers is the need for information to drive their risk management and to drive all other decisions that are required for them to farm in a viable way. So I think it underscore that you need information about markets, about other dimensions that are not necessarily agricultural but that are going to impact on you. So it has created this appetite for farmers to appreciate much more what information means in terms of decisions and planning. The second point really is opportunities that I see maybe in three, four ways. One, data is of information is powerful for accountability. It enables people to account on an objective basis. So if it's wildlife valuable, then it helps farmers account or make those that are along the value chain account. The second point really is that it enhances transparency. If data is there, then it's transparent. And also if data is there, it also enables sharing. And you know that there is the information, how do you share it? If the information is hidden along the value chain, it's very difficult to share the information on value on risk. So it is one element that is very but also more importantly, information is an opportunity is a currency for negotiation. If you don't have it, you won't be able to negotiate. So it's so powerful. I see information being deployed across all of these different functions and perhaps COVID has given us opportunity to reset and look at it much more comprehensively in this way. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, I know that when we were trying to reach farmers with COVID information, we had launched a technology platform that we were so grateful had also reached WHO. And so we were able to get that health messaging, that trusted health messaging out at scale. It really, I appreciate what you're saying that it's about health information as well as, I mean, it's all kinds of information are necessary. Okay, so on the opportunities moving forward, let's move forward to Sventor. From your perspective at YARA, what do you see as the real opportunities for data to be transformational in agricultural systems now? Well, Lisa, I think it's a huge agriculture in history has already been through three revolutions. And I think we're in the middle of the fourth agricultural revolution right now and it's driven by data and technology. So I think it's right now, without a doubt, the biggest enabler to create a resilient food system. And we're talking about empowering the farmers, Ishmael also touched upon. And a typical farmer makes about, they make a lot of decisions, but it's about 300 major decisions in a year. And many of those are based on limited information, but technology changes that. The farmers need, for example, data on weather, on data on soil, on nutrient uptake and millions and millions of data points. And up until quite recently, this is information that only huge industrial-sized farms would have access to and even they would struggle to get all of it. But now with technology, using satellite technology, sensors and so on and the use of smartphones, we're empowering the farmers. So we're giving all that knowledge straight to the farmers and also smallholder farmers. And it creates a transparency throughout the whole food system. And as Ishmael also said, it changes the power. Information is power. And by making that visible, we're changing that. I think I'll keep it there for now. Thank you so much. Okay, so we'll go ahead and move to Stuart for your response. And I know you already started moving in this direction, but what do you see is the key transformational opportunities here with data? Yeah, well, I mean, without kind of repeating what was already kind of well pointed out, I would say that one of the things that's been transformational from COVID for our team is really around the business model of data. So typically to even get a subscription to some of these services that are gonna help to analyze satellite information or digitize your farm is typically out of the price, out of the affordability range of many of the farmers that required the most. And so one of the things that we're trying to do is to find partners and business models that allow us to provide the same level of software and analytics and capabilities to everybody. And a lot of these services, these types of services exist in our everyday lives in many of the developed countries. Most people have very few applications on their smartphone that they have ever purchased, but they are the direct beneficiary of these services. And we feel that agriculture, one of the big revolutions that we can hopefully contribute to in a small way is to be able to develop a new business model that allows all of these farmers to have affordable access to the same kinds of tools that some of these big multinational corporations have. And so a lot of the development that we even did over the past six months was what are the ways in which we can deploy at scale and make not just the data accessible but to make the tools to make that data useful, accessible to everyone. Thank you so much, Stuart. Yeah, we, as we were working with our eight and a half million farmers on this, I think it was a moment of transformation for farmers where they really realized that being able to leverage their cell phone was their bridge to the outside world and they were desperately seeking information. So this effort to democratize data and stream it to farmers, I think we may have hit an inflection point that will take us forward. And last on this question, Phillip Tigo, what do you see is the big opportunities? I know you have a big vision. Thank you, Lisa. I think the first thing I was seeing is a shift of mindset. People are not thinking systems. It was a health crisis, but then it all of a sudden became a food economic job crisis. So I think for me that's, that's an exciting bit of this. The second exciting bit is you're seeing an acceleration. There's actually an agency and agency around investment in data and data systems, including policy members. The third bit I think that we're seeing is also money. Previously, people are not funding data. They're funding statistics. So we're seeing now a shift on how people find data for, for the data for this in making an action. We also had a challenge, a tech challenge that was looking at health systems innovation, food systems innovation and dignified work. During COVID-19, an interesting enough is the biggest category with most innovators pitching was food systems. So we're already seeing now that we are seeing more innovations and sort of thinking around this. The last two pieces are tied into much stakeholder collaboration. Now with the food situation war room, we see now it's organic. Relationships have changed. It's not a vendor government. It's more a collaboration and partnership, but also this whole bit of interoperability. We are seeing now a willingness to make data and data systems interoperable between private sector, government and other data players. Thank you. Thanks very much. And that's very encouraging. I know that we have a few minutes left for our last two questions and they're important. The first one is, or the next question is around enablers. So what enablers are critical to keep this momentum going to push this acceleration forward, to build on these partnerships and create a culture of data sharing to drive resilient and equitable and efficient food systems. And I think we'll go ahead and we'll have two speakers on this. Two people respond to this question since we're running low on time. And I'll take this first to Sven Torr. Thanks Lisa. I'd say that there are two set of enablers here. First is the technology part, but it's also the human part of it. But if I was to start with the technology part, first it's about reach. It's about relevance to the farmer, but also user-friendly, user-friendliness. And with reach is one of the key promises of technology that it's easy to and rapid to scale. But the relevance part is also very important here and that we gathered the crucial information but we translate that into format that is also understandable. Just using an example from Björn in recent weeks is what we're doing in Eastern Africa with support for farmers of fertilizer where we're donating 40,000 tons of fertilizer. But that's not the key of the donation. It's more reaching out to farmers and giving them relevant agronomic knowledge. And just in a few weeks now we've been able to reach 700,000 farmers. But then the human part, it's also we need to work differently. We need to think holistically throughout the whole value chain and we need to open up with data. If you don't share the data, how can we think holistically? And that's a mindset change that I think all of us have to really think through and open up. We were not trained from business schools or engineering schools or where we're going to share data with competitors and throughout the whole value chain. But that's really key in order to get this to work at scale and with relevance. Thank you very much for that. And Stuart, if you don't mind, I'll direct the same question to you. What enablers are critical to create a culture where data can be leveraged to build more resilient and equitable and efficient food systems? Yeah, I mean, I'll definitely echo what Sventor said about the user-friendly aspect of it. Many of the farmers that we are looking to impact eventually in the future, maybe individuals that may or may not be literate, they may or may not have, they all have a different level of competence of different educational backgrounds. And what we're really trying to do is really the vision of Alaska is to democratize access to fresh and nutritious food by democratizing the means and the knowledge of production. And on the means side, we were really focused on the hardware, the actual core components that would allow people to grow food. And then the knowledge aspect is about the experience as well as the data in the software that would allow us to scale the impact that we want to see. And really to have a user-centric approach is very, very important. And something that we're really excited about launching hopefully sooner rather than later is to be able to open up the same software that runs our sophisticated indoor farm and make these things available for free. And we feel that there are many ways in which this can add enormous value, not just to the farmers themselves, but also to the value chain. And by opening up this service and the data that we can collect, these are things that we can share to make better, more regional decisions as opposed to individual farmer decisions. And these are all things that can help us build up an economy of scale that can help the farmers even more in the future. And so we're trying to find ways in which we can take the same kind of tools that we incubated really to make our indoor farm more efficient and then to open them up much, much more broadly so that we can really see that democratization happening, not just on the data side, but really the access to the tools that makes that data useful and also that makes that data collection and access and analytics possible. Great, thank you so much. Okay, the last question to the panel and I'll ask everyone to jump in on this one is around what's next for this year? What is our call to action now? So we're about one year away from the Key Global Milestone and the UN Food Systems Summit, what needs to happen over the next year to showcase the power of data in transforming global food systems and making them more resilient. So what is our call to action? And maybe I'll go ahead and ask Ishmael to respond to that one first. Thank you, Lisa. Just three main points. The first point really is to democratize data and access to data, you need the infrastructure to be right. So we need to invest in that backbone infrastructure that allows data to flow as far afield as possible to the hinterland where most of the farmers are. So invest in backbone infrastructure. It could be fire by infrastructure and then do the last mile. So that investment is fundamental to democratize access and to democratize its use. The second point really, and also the scale. The second point really is that we should really look at the data value chain. Sometimes you're looking at data as an input into farmer's decision, but at the same time, the data itself is a value, a fundamental value, and there's no sharing equity in that. So it's a black box that needs to be opened so that everyone has access to it, including the farmers, because we're only seeing it as an input, not as a value, as a good. So how do we deal with the sharing of the data? Maybe the concept of data cooperatives that everyone pulls it in could be explored. The third point really is about the way relations are managed because farmers also need data on what the upstream players are doing. In most cases, it is upstream players who are looking for data from farmers, and they don't think that farmers also need data about what they are doing, how much they're making, like middlemen, what are their production targets. So let's also have a bilateral value exchange, and more importantly, and lastly, as long as we treat farmers, continue to treat them as customers, not as business partners who always look at them providing data, but they also need to get data from the other side. Those are four critical paths that would define the future for us. Thank you. Great, thank you. And Phillip, you are up next. What's the call to arms? Two things. I think one is investment again, and we need to really invest. And I think with COVID-19, we know now it's about everything. Whether it's in capacity tools, platforms, people, partnerships, processes, we need an investment and a ramp up of investments right up to the summit next year. The second thing is data is political, and I think we normally forget this. It's not a technical issue. I think all of us technical people get it. So we really need high-level leadership, we need high-level champions, and we need to keep data high in the political agenda as we move towards next year. Great, and then I'll direct it to Stuart. What, from your side, what is our call to action? Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure. I don't really have like a concrete thing around this, but honestly, I think that there, when people understand how much data is already available and already open, I think they'll be more open to the idea of sharing their own data. There is a lot of information being released by the European Space Agency, by NASA, by many, many geological surveys around the world that is valuable to farmers making their decisions on a daily basis, and this is all freely available. And I think when people understand how much data is already out there, how much of this is already being shared openly, they would be more comfortable contributing their small part to making this data set a little bit more comprehensive and a little bit more valuable to everybody that can access it. And so, yeah, so I mean, one of the big things, honestly, is around the mindset of sharing and given how much is already out there, we're hoping to be able to create a community around some of the act tech companies that we work with very closely and to start trying to make this data more transparent and more available so that anybody can access this and make either build on top of it or to make better decisions with it. Great, and Sventor, what is your sense of what we should be doing in the coming year? Well, I think I want to echo what Ishmael Philip and Stewart already said, and that's data opening up or democratizing data and creating an infrastructure. And through that, we could create a set of these neutral platform where you can calculate the carbon footprint of food. If I was to really be ambitious, I would like to know if you can see on the screen there, but this is food labeling that you have today with nutritional content. What if we could have the similar on carbon footprint? So that's known to everyone. I think that would be a game changer for farmers as well because then they would not only get paid for the crop, but they would be paid for how efficient, for carbon using the farm as a carbon sink and for how healthy the food is as well. So that we're not putting additional burden on the shoulders of the farmers. They're already in a difficult position, but if we create new revenue streams and data can do that through transparency, but it has to be on a platform that is seen as neutral and non-political. And actually, in January, in Davos, we launched this initiative together with IBM on creating a global open data platform. We're working with 30 partners on that. And I want you to consider this an open invitation to all of you to join in on that, to create this vision for how an open data exchange could look in the future. It's a huge undertaking, but I also have to mention, there's a lot of data out there. So if you visualize this and what's already available, but put it together in one platform, I think that would be one of the big ambitions that we should have for the next year leading up to the food summit. Thank you so much, everyone. So we've got five, seven minutes left for Q&A, which is always the fate in webinar somehow, but a lot of really great questions. So one of the first questions that came through was data is the new currency. How do we make sure that there isn't monetization of data by a few and in that equal value of shared data, make sure that it reaches smallholder farmers? And I know that many of you have spoken to this already. You know, I know that Ishmael has and basically everyone has, but would one of you guys like to talk to this point of essentially how do we make sure that everyone has an equal share of value in data? Maybe I'll kick it to you, Philip. No, yeah, sorry. We actually, it's something we are working on right now because what we've seen is that the only way to do this, and this requires a global scale engagement around agile governance. And so how do you create an agile governance framework then that recognizes this? That it recognizes the value of data, it recognizes the data users, data producers, and then assigns value to that and so that everybody can benefit from that data. Okay, yeah, I agree with you. And I really appreciated Stuart's point of that so many players have data. If everyone knew how much data was out there and what it meant to engage in the types of platforms that Sventor has outlined and all the way down to the farmer as Ishmael has outlined, I think that's the way forward. One of the panelists said, should there be an international treaty on international data sharing and how can data be used for regenerative agriculture? But so do we need an international treaty on this? I mean, one of the things obviously is every country has its own data sharing regulations. Most of my partners are terrified to share data with anybody. They're afraid they're gonna get in trouble. And one thing that we haven't talked about obviously is farmer protection, is client protection, informed consent, how do we make sure that farmers are not being taken advantage of and that they do have some degree of control over their own data? So what do you guys think? Does this have to happen at the international level? Is that something WEF should be pushing for? Maybe I'll go ahead and go to Ishmael. Put you on the spot first. Yeah, I think we really need to start from the practical side. If I were to speak on behalf of farmers, I think the problem that is at hand here is that when data is sitting with a farmer, the farmer's data on his own is worthless. But when it's aggregated, that's where it makes sense. But unfortunately, individual farmers aggregate their data towards one point, which might be an agribusiness, might be a bank, and they don't have that aggregation themselves. So at the end of the day, the value that is sitting in aggregated data is not sitting with the farmers, it is sitting there. And yet that value has been created by them. We then need a mechanism of the value that has been aggregated, that they are not able to aggregate themselves. We need a mechanism, hence the concept of maybe a data cooperative that ensures that that data that has been aggregated in the course of engaging with farmers goes into a pool and a way of sharing it. So that's the practical side. That may then over time develop into treaties, but maybe let's start with the practicals before you go into the treaties. Thank you. That's a really interesting perspective, and it leads into a little cluster of questions that I'll try to put together as our last question to the audience. Someone says there are multiple discrete variables that hit us. And you guys mentioned this as well during COVID. Status of ports, supply chains working, raw material flow. So there's no single source of information. How do we integrate all of this data? Someone else said, I know that blockchain solutions for food security and transparency are out there. Is this a way that we should proceed further? Or is it still too far away? So I guess this is a question for you guys. How do we integrate data from the farmer all the way to the fork, from farmer to fork? What are some ways that we can integrate the kinds of data that we need for decisioning? It's obviously going to take an ecosystem approach. It's going to require all kinds of sharing that Sventor said we don't teach in business school. I love that. Maybe I'll open this up to you guys are all nodding your head. Maybe we'll just have each one of you just a real quick one on this. Philip, you're nodding your head a lot. Go ahead. It's because you're working on this in Kenya. So this is the problem with Kenya. We're actually working on that and we think through this. So quickly, it must be a federated data system. This one big platform, in most cases, it doesn't work. So ideally, how do you ensure that the systems are federated and then you have a data sharing framework that ensures interoperability so that people like government simply just create standards? I think for us, that's how we see it. And I'm not so fascinated by the technology themselves. But can we have the fundamentals around, whether it's blockchain or the rest, that we simply ensure that the fundamentals are the same? Protection, interoperability, value, and privacy. Very good. And Sventor, would you like to speak to this? Yes, Liz, I still think there will be a lot of variables out there. But it's about doing something in the areas where we can use data to make more informed decisions, whether that is on weather. With the latest technology, you can get hyper-local weather for the farmers. It's very important to know whether it will rain in the next hours or not. And then not what the weather forecast is for the closest big set is that the seeds and crop nutrition is not washed away, for instance. It's about understanding soil health so that we deal with the areas where we do have data and where we can do something about that and reducing the overall risk. But still, there will be a lot of variables here. But for me, this is more about reducing that uncertainty. Very good. And Stuart, how would you attack this problem of so many different sources and uses of data and the need to integrate? Yeah, I mean, I think just instead of thinking too big, I think it's just easy to start with what your organization can do, or what your community can do, what your city can do. I think having a global framework, anything that requires a lot of different stakeholders takes quite a bit of time. And so from our perspective, we digitize everything that's happening in our farm, and we open it up to our customers. And so we can prove to them objectively that we're not using certain harmful chemicals in our farms, that the quality of the product is as advertised, the freshness is as advertised. And so we try to create this trust with the customers that we're able to work with most directly. And what that's actually done is it's created a much stickier service for us, because their other suppliers are unable to provide this level of data. So they're saying, how come this tiny company has this level of transparency into their production, their logistics, and why is it that their other suppliers can't do it? And they're now starting to demand this level of transparency from their other suppliers as well. So it's encouraging to see that even this small effort of taking the data that we already have and opening up to our customers is having an impact on how they do procurement going forward. And it's very encouraging to see that change. And then really very briefly, I'll say that we are already used to sharing a lot of our data. We give our data to services that we use that advertise to us every day, whether that's Facebook or Google or all these things. And I feel that a lot of the fear and privacy fears that we have and the data sharing fears that we have is disproportional given the fact that we are already so accustomed to doing this. And this engine is already running in the background. And so I think this mindset shift happening where the fact that we are already doing a lot of these things that if we can just come together and share data in the way that we already are doing, I think it have a huge transformative effect on making the entire supply chain, the entire value chain, much more efficient. OK. Well, thank you to our partner, to our panelists. This has been an amazing discussion. Just very briefly, it's hard to wrap up so many different points. But I think that a major takeaway for us is that COVID-19 has been catalytic. It has brought actors together. It has helped us to understand where the weaknesses are in our food systems and how interdependent we are beyond just food systems. And that it starts at the farmer and it goes all the way to the top of the food systems chains and that we need to find new sharing models, that there's a lot of impetus right now, there's a lot of focus in government, in industry, with tech innovators, and at the farmer organization level as well. So we have an amazing moment, an amazing opportunity now that's going to require investment. And it's going to require pushing the boundaries on sharing and how we use technology and how we protect farmers, but how we include farmers and make them an active part of this entire process and give them the information of those. What did you say, Svens, where you said 300 major decisions that a farmer has to make every year that drive our food security and drive our food systems? So we're excited about taking that forward with you guys here at Mercy Corps and I'm so impressed with this global panel and I think another thing that's very interesting about COVID-19 is this was an absolutely global event. We're all in this together. We're all experiencing this in the same ways and hopefully we'll keep this momentum up and stay united around it. Thank you Ishmael, Philip, Sventor, Stewart. Thank you very much and I'll go ahead and turn it over now to Lisa Sweet who will bring us home. Great, thank you everyone to this wonderful amazing panel led by Lisa Schrader. You've been fantastic in really helping us to understand what's at the crux of this issue and what the great opportunities are that are out there if we can bring data in, if we can think of it in an ecosystem way, if we can partner differently, if we can change our mindsets. At the World Economic Forum, we're striving to bring the stakeholders together to enhance some of the opportunities that have been discussed in this call through our regional food innovation hubs, through our Vision 2030, through our fourth industrial revolution centers and through many other projects and works and we invite you to join us. We will have a series of sessions that are coming up throughout the course of the day today and tomorrow and we invite you to join in and thank you so much to everybody out there for embracing this opportunity to use data and bring it to the food systems for greater resiliency. Thanks so much.