Sustainability in Data and Food

Abstract

As the world population continues to increase, world food production is not keeping up. This means that to continue to feed the world, we will need to optimize the production and utilization of food around the globe. Optimization of a process on a global scale requires massive data. Agriculture is no exception, but also brings its own unique issues, based on how wide spread agricultural data are, and the wide variety of data that is relevant to optimization of food production and supply. This suggests that we need a global data ecosystem for agriculture and nutrition. Such an ecosystem already exists to some extent, made up of data sets, metadata sets and even search engines that help to locate and utilize data sets. A key concept behind this is sustainability—how do we sustain our data sets, so that we can sustain our production and distribution of food? In order to make this vision a reality, we need to navigate the challenges for sustainable data management on a global scale. Starting from the current state of practice, how do we move forward to a practice in which we make use of global data to have an impact on world hunger? In particular, how do we find, collect and manage the data? How can this be effectively deployed to improve practice in the field? And how can we make sure that these practices are leading to the global goals of improving production, distribution and sustainability of the global food supply? These questions cannot be answered yet, but they are the focus of ongoing and future research to be published in this journal and elsewhere.