2016 AAAS Annual Meeting (February 11-15, 2016)

February 10 - 15, 2016

Using Data to Enhance Food Productivity in Subsistence Farming

Food Security Poor countries around the world depend on subsistence farming for the bulk of their calories. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, however, low-yield agriculture prevails and improvements in food production are stagnant. Fast-growing populations, increasing urbanization and consumer demand, and challenges presented by climate change further strain agricultural resources. Improving smallholder livelihoods through sustainable intensification depends on many factors: an ecosystem approach to natural resource and farm management; improved crop varieties through plant breeding; innovations in farming; knowledge generation and sharing; and equitable access to markets. While a ‘data revolution’ for Africa has been proposed to fill critical knowledge gaps that policymakers ultimately depend upon, smallholder farmers and their communities cannot wait for ‘good’ data. A growing community of scientists is mobilizing to meet this challenge by combining alternative data generating methods (i.e., those made possible through publicly available global datasets), geo-referenced household surveys, remote sensing satellite imagery, geographic information systems, and computer modeling. By taking advantage of this global knowledge á la carte, and exchanging information across borders by using free, harmonized datasets that span different scales, geographies, and disciplines, science can begin to inform the future of farming.