Technology for Sustainable Urban Food Ecosystems in the Developing World: Strengthening the Nexus of Food–Water–Energy–Nutrition

Abstract

Smart integration of technology can help create sustainable urban food ecosystems (UFEs) for the rapidly expanding urban population in the developing world. Technology, especially recent advances in digital-enabled devices based on internet connectivity, are essential for building UFEs at a time when food production is increasingly limited on a global scale by the availability of land, water, and energy. By 2050, two-thirds of the world will be urban-and most of the net world population growth will occur in urban regions in the developing world. A food crisis is looming, with the developing world ill-prepared to sustainably feed itself. We identify 12 innovative technology platforms to advance the UFEs of the developing world: (1) connectivity-information delivery and digital technology platforms; (2) uberized services; (3) precision agriculture (GPS, IoT-Internet of things, AI-artificial intelligence, sensing technology); (4) CEA-controlled environment agriculture, including vertical farms; (5) blockchain for greater transparency, food safety, and identification; (6) solar and wind power connected to microgrids; (7) high-quality, enhanced seeds for greater yield, nutrition, climate, and pest resistance; (8) advanced genetics, including gene editing, synthetic biology, and cloud biology; (9) biotechnology, including microbiome editing, soil biologicals, cultured meat, alternative proteins to meat and dairy; (10) nanotechnology and advanced materials; (11) 3-D printing/additive manufacturing; and (12) integration of new tech to scale-up underutilized, existing technologies. The new tech-enabled UFEs, linked to value-chains, will create entrepreneurial opportunities-and more efficiently use resources and people to connect the nexus of food, water, energy, and nutrition.

Innovative Digital Technologies for Purchasing and Consumption in Urban and Regional Agro-Food Systems: A Systematic Review

“…African researches mainly addressed the use of ICT tools by farmers, especially for farm management and marketing of products. For example, the "CocoaLink" platform connects stakeholders in the Ghanaian cocoa supply chain, "Digital Green" shares good agricultural practices among smallholder farmers in Ethiopia through videos in local languages, and "MFarm" connects Kenyan farmers with urban markets [29].…”

“…"Digital Green" shares good agricultural practices among smallholder farmers in Ethiopia through videos in local languages, and "MFarm" connects Kenyan farmers with urban markets [29]. Research studies that focused on more than one country were counted more than once.…”

Back to Nature With Fenceless Farms—Technology Opportunities to Reconnect People and Food

“…Micro-services will deliver technological insight through algorithms, efficiency through automation and trust through authenticated encrypted data streams. The underlying connectivity and availability of information will drive opportunities to create greater democratised responses to consumer needs and wants (Davies and Garrett, 2018;Suhail et al, 2020).…”

Global issues in agricultural development

“…It is a business platform of entrepreneurs operating in Africa and Central America, in which small farmers use their mobile phones to contract with Hello Tractor for tractors to plow and harvest their fields, track when they will arrive, and make mobile money payments. Hello Tractor uses smart tractors linked to the cloud with a GPS antenna and international SIM card for remote monitoring (Davies and Garrett 2018).…”