Du gauche à droite : JM Attonaty, G. Waksman, et JM Savalle

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities have advanced in dramatic ways over the past decade.

For example, in the ability to generate photorealistic images - including, in the past couple years, from almost any text prompt.AI systems already have a large impact on our lives - they increasingly shape what we see, what we believe, and what we do.

And given recent increases in investment, we should expect AI technology to become even more powerful and impactful in the years and decades to come.

How exactly powerful AI systems are built and used will be very important for the future of our world, and our own lives.

All technologies can have positive and negative consequences, but with AI the range of these consequences is extraordinarily large: the technology has an immense potential for good, but also comes with large downsides and high risks.

A technology that has such a large impact on our society needs to be of central interest to people across our entire society. But, the question of how this technology will be developed and used is currently left to a small group of entrepreneurs and engineers.

With our publications on artificial intelligence, we want to help change this status quo and support a wider engagement by society.On our new page, you will find a series of articles and an overview of AI-related metrics that let you monitor what is happening and where we might be heading. We hope that this work will be helpful for the growing and necessary public conversation on AI.

See ourworldindata.org 02/01/23

Sunset over the plain, by Jean-Ferdinand Chaigneau (1830-1906), École de Barbizon

05 - 02/01/23

The Barbizon School / Ecole de Barbizon, an excellent document in English and French

Does open source agtech make sense? Easy Observations, by Nathan Faleide

See easyobservations.substack.com

Poor Brexiters

01 - 02/01/23

More than 50 commercially available field robots in the Future Farming buying guide 2023
See futurefarming.com


Corteva, NEVONEX Collaborate to Explore Advanced Digitally Enabled Crop Protection Opportunities

Companies aim to deliver prescriptive crop protection product performance and farmer ROI through advanced data capabilities.
See globalagtechinitiative.com


How BASF's AI Farming Tool Is Helping Japanese Growers Struggling With Labor Shortage

The daily recommendations from xarvio Field Manager increased yields by as much as 25%, according to Japanese company Yamazaki Rice.
See globalagtechinitiative.com


Amazing America!

02 - 02/01/23

Toro, Treetoscope Form Partnership to Accelerate Plant Sensing Technology for North American Market

The partnership adds to Toro’s growing range of crop monitoring, decision support, and automation solutions,
See globalagtechinitiative.com


Israel-based Haskelberg Nurseries Enters Joint Venture With UK-Based Yellow Brick AgTech for New Software Offering

The new software will fall under Haskelberg Nurseries subsidiary brand Canacado, an avocado rootstocks selection.
See globalagtechinitiative.com


5 Things Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About Agriculture

Fail fast, fail often doesn't work for farmers. Here are five agricultural realities funders and innovators need to understand.
See globalagtechinitiative.com


Cooling Inflation

03 - 02/01/23

Farmers Cultivate Golden Rice in the Philippines for the First Time

For the first time, farmers in the Philippines have cultivated Golden Rice on a larger scale and harvested almost 70 tons of grains this October. This nearly never-ending story began at ETH Zurich.

This autumn will probably go down in agrarian history. In October, farmers in the Philippine Province of Antique harvested a substantial amount of beta-​carotene-enriched Golden Rice for the first time – namely a total of 67 tons from 17 fields.

The dried and polished grains are going to be distributed to households with pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers or preschool children who are at risk of diseases caused by vitamin A deficiency.
.../...
See ethz.ch


No Covid, less saving!

04 - 02/01/23

But Overall Savings Up

05 - 02/01/23

Which countries have put a price on carbon?

Putting a price on carbon helps us account for the real costs of fossil fuels in the market. Which countries have a carbon tax or trading system?

See ourworldindata.org 02/01/23

Food Barons 2022: Crisis Profiteering, Digitalization and Shifting Power

Note: I am a little bit skeptical about some ideas expressed in this report. But it seems to me the information here gathered is really interesting.

ETC Group’s 2022 update of corporate concentration offers a snapshot of the world’s Food Barons – the biggest players up and down the industrial food and agriculture chain. We examine the leading corporations that control each of 11 key industrial “agrifood” sectors: seeds, agrochemicals, livestock genetics, synthetic fertilizers, farm machinery, animal pharmaceuticals, commodity traders, food processors, Big Meat, grocery retail and food delivery. Rankings are based on 2020 sales figures.

Our findings show that many agrifood sectors are now so “top heavy” they are controlled by just four to six dominant firms, enabling these companies to wield enormous influence over markets, agricultural research and policy-development, which undermines food sovereignty.

The year 2020 was a horrific year for food security and health – but a bonanza for Big Food and Big Ag. In the midst of a global pandemic – combined with climate shocks, supply chain gridlock, price spikes, increasing hunger, food and energy shortages, civil strife, racial violence and wars – these Food Barons made the most of the converging crises in order to tighten their grip on every link in the Industrial Food Chain. In doing so, they undermine the rights of peasants, smallholders, fishers and pastoralists to produce food for their own communities and many others. The Food Barons exploit workers, poison soil and water, diminish biodiversity, prevent climate justice and perpetuate a food system structured upon racial and economic injustice.

We identify seven key aspects of the global Industrial Food Chain, which we have conceptualized in terms of power: The Food Barons aim to hold on to, naturalize and expand their power, despite their many failings – failings that became especially obvious during the global pandemic.

We also bring attention to three critical, multi-sectoral trends that increase the ability of the Food Barons – Big Ag, together with Big Tech and Big Finance – to maintain control over the Industrial Food Chain. The first of these is the digitalization of food and agriculture across the chain. The second is the rising power of Asian (especially Chinese) Food Barons. The third is horizontal integration, including the increasing involvement of asset management companies in food and agriculture sectors – which creates the semblance of competition, but diminishes actual competition.

In contrast to the increasing concentration and power of the Food Barons it is important to remind ourselves who feeds the majority of the world: peasants. The Peasant Food Web feeds the equivalent of 70% of the world’s people using less than 30% of the world’s land, water and agricultural resources. Proposals from the grassroots – such as the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty’s Nyéléni Process – aim to put farmers, growers, fishers, hunters and consumers back at the heart of the food system and undo the power being usurped by industrial agriculture.

As we confront climate change and its alarming consequences, we must recognize the voices, actions, solutions, and leadership of all peoples. The analysis in this report is based on understanding the relationship between racial justice and climate change and how extractive agriculture disproportionately impacts people of colour and Indigenous communities.

It’s time to divest from the Industrial Food Chain. Institutions under pressure from civil society have already succeeded in partly directing funds away from tobacco, arms and fossil fuels on moral grounds. Grassroots climate movements have successfully named fossil fuel companies as the obstruction to meaningful climate action. Food movements should follow suit: it is a logical next step to demand the elimination of all financial support to the Industrial Food Chain, exposing its high degree of transnational corporate control and its multiple abuses.

The participatory assessment of technologies based on precaution, as well as the development and support for the implementation of socially and ecologically useful technologies, should also be a top priority. In addition, anti-competition regulators must develop new mechanisms to understand and restrict the cross-chain powers of data giants and horizontal shareholders and require much greater transparency among private equity and other corporate actors.

This is a moment to see the Food Barons for what they are, to find their structural weaknesses and to take strategic collaborative action to take them on. Hopefully this report provides some useful intelligence for food sovereignty movements and their allies in the battles ahead.
See etcgroup.org


Paysage de plaine (aquarelle) par Jean-Ferdinand Chaigneau (1830-1906), École de Barbizon

06 - 02/01/23

The Barbizon School / Ecole de Barbizon, an excellent document in English and French

Life expectancy changes since COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered an unprecedented rise in mortality that translated into life expectancy losses around the world, with only a few exceptions. We estimate life expectancy changes in 29 countries since 2020 (including most of Europe, the United States and Chile), attribute them to mortality changes by age group and compare them with historic life expectancy shocks. Our results show divergence in mortality impacts of the pandemic in 2021.

While countries in western Europe experienced bounce backs from life expectancy losses of 2020, eastern Europe and the United States witnessed sustained and substantial life expectancy deficits. Life expectancy deficits during fall/winter 2021 among people ages 60+ and <60 were negatively correlated with measures of vaccination uptake across countries (r60+ = −0.86; two-tailed P < 0.001; 95% confidence interval, −0.94 to −0.69; r<60 = −0.74; two-tailed P < 0.001; 95% confidence interval, −0.88 to −0.46). In contrast to 2020, the age profile of excess mortality in 2021 was younger, with those in under-80 age groups contributing more to life expectancy losses.

However, even in 2021, registered COVID-19 deaths continued to account for most life expectancy losses.

See nature.com 02/01/23

Barbizon in the snow by Eugène Lavieille (1820-1889), École de Barbizon

07 - 02/01/23

The Barbizon School / Ecole de Barbizon, an excellent document in English and French

If the secret police had a file on you, why wouldn’t you want to see it? Ask the Germans spied on by the Stasi, by Laura Spinney, Mon 28 Nov 2022

When East Germany collapsed, millions of the Stasi’s victims choose to remain in ignorance about their oppressors. Is it sometimes better to forget the past than to investigate it?
.../..
In East Germany, during the communist period, people would sometimes join a queue on the basis that if others were waiting, there must be something worth having at the end of it. Siegfried Wittenburg, whose images accompany this article, photographed this waiting-for-I-know-not-what in his home town of Rostock. It was safer to take photos than to criticise the regime in words, but only just.

The Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, kept Wittenburg under surveillance from 1972 almost until its own dissolution. The last entry in his file, which concerned some photos he had exhibited of Rostock’s dilapidated old town, was dated 27 November 1989 – almost three weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He knows this because he applied to see that file in 1999. Having discovered the identities of his informers, he made peace with one of them – whom the Stasi had blackmailed – and cut ties with the others. “Ever since I cleaned up my past, I feel free,” says the 69-year-old. “I became more open, happier, warmer – and successful.”

Many former East German citizens tell similar stories, which is why a new study in the journal Cognition has caused some consternation. Historian Dagmar Ellerbrock, of the Technical University Dresden, and psychologist Ralph Hertwig of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, report that the majority of people on whom the Stasi kept files have not opened them.

The finding has touched a particular nerve in Germany, which can sometimes seem like an open-air museum to the horrors of nazism, but all countries have zones of oblivion.

Like Britain, Germany has yet to confront the violence it meted out in its former colonies, while France is struggling to process the Algerian war.

Spain only recently dissolved the pact of forgetting it made after the Franco era.

As the pandemic begins to fade from memory, and history is weaponised in Ukraine, the study has fuelled a wider conversation about how societies deal with past trauma and the role that individuals play in that reckoning.

“I’m not justifying deliberate ignorance,” says Hertwig, “but I do want to understand it.”
…/…
See theguardian.com


US importing more goods from Europe

06 - 02/01/23

National crisis support plans

07 - 02/01/23

Perspective: Europe's Farm to Fork Strategy slams into wall of reality, by Amanda Zalucky

The European People’s Party has completely abandoned the Farm to Fork fantasy where farming can use primitive production practices to meet modern demand.
.../...
In a stunning reversal the European People’s Party is abandoning — at least for now — the implementation of the European Union’s Farm to Fork Strategy. Why? Because they see the writing on the wall: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is going to disrupt European agricultural markets. So the EPP, the European Parliament’s largest political party, is calling on the European Commission to halt so-called green initiatives in favor of developing a “food safety plan” using “reliable forecasts” and “concrete measures” to ensure Europeans don’t have “empty plates.”

To fully appreciate how astonishing this statement is, you have to understand the Farm to Fork Strategy. It’s part of the European Union’s Green Deal, which aims to make Europe carbon neutral by 2050. Farm to Fork focuses on radically changing agriculture on the continent, especially when it comes to inputs. The plan calls for reducing pesticide use by farmers by as much as 50 percent, and reducing fertilizer use by 20 percent. It also calls for farmers to take 10 percent of existing farmland out of production. And, last but not least, Farm to Fork’s goal is to transition 25 percent of Europe’s farmland into organic production.

It doesn’t take a degree in rocket science to realize that’s going to cause some problems with supply. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service analyzed the potential effects of Farm to Fork and raised the alarm in 2020. It found the plan would lower European agricultural production by a range of 7 to 12 percent. If only the EU adopted the plan, it would drive up world food prices by 9 percent. And if the plan is adopted globally, production would fall by 11 percent and prices would skyrocket 89 percent.

And that doesn’t even mention the environmental costs. There’s no question that widespread adoption of lower-yielding production methods simply means we need more farmland to produce the same amount of food. Farm to Fork just outsources those additional acres outside the continent. So where will they come from? Unfortunately, that answer too often comes from currently untouched lands, including the all-important rainforest in South America.

But that didn’t matter to the EPP when the world seemed sane and life was easy. It could define sustainability and dictate the arbitrary and radical terms to Europe’s lowly farmers. So what if food prices rise needlessly and make it harder for low-income households to make ends meet. As long as EU politicians went to bed with full stomachs they could feel good about all the sacrifices they made to support Mother Nature!

All of that came crashing down as Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine and the shelling started. Farmers can’t plant fields occupied by foreign militaries. So the price of food and fuel started climbing. And suddenly empty plates and grumbling tummies became all too real.

The EPP’s change in policy position is astonishing. They’ve completely abandoned the fantasy where agriculture can use primitive production practices to meet modern demand. In other words, farmers need to grow food. Lots of food. And they shouldn’t be hindered by an eco-fairytale of what agriculture should be.

Welcome to the real world.

See agdaily.com


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