Mobile phone is the new communication technology that I
am familiar with and would like to discuss its adoption in agricultural
extension systems for disseminating information from lab to land.
From
the ages, agricultural extension has been recognized as an essential mechanism
for enabling information and knowledge transfers from agricultural research
labs to farmer fields. The research-farmer linkages mediated by the extension
system played a crucial role in the advancement of food security during green
revolution. Today, extension systems are in a state of decline in many
countries. Many of the extension agents have come to believe extension has to
escape from the narrow mindset of transferring technology packages while moving
toward a constantly innovating knowledge transfer mode that supports decisions,
innovation and personal growth among farmers and seed entrepreneurs.
Advances in Information and Communication Technologies
(ICTs) provided enormous opportunities to explore web based knowledge sharing
and extension functionaries in transferring technology packages from laboratory
to farm to the broadest number of farmers, for example Agropedia, AgMark,
Market Maker, eXtension etc. However many of these web based extension portals
have limitations to establish the last mile connectivity.
The advent of mobile technology has addressed a greater
array of earlier ICT platform last mile connectivity issues – infrastructure,
connectivity, training needs, literacy issues etc. It also further reduces the investments on
capacity building activities. As the
farmer’s started owning mobile phones it is relatively advantageous to use
mobile as a communication medium than the array of earlier ICT platforms
(information kiosks, web, fixed phones etc.) for transferring information from
lab to land.
Based on its relative advantage, I believe the speed of
adoption of the mobile phone technology in the future is higher than the array
of earlier ICT platforms. For example, in
the year 2003 in Africa there were 6.1 mobile subscribers for every 100 persons
as compared to 3.0 fixed line subscribers per 100 persons. In 2005, there were
52 million mobile subscribers compared to 25 million for fixed lines. The commission for Africa estimates that the
number of mobile subscribers in Africa will continue to expand at the rate of
35 per cent over the next few years.
1 comment:
What an interesting post. It is interesting how the relative advantage of technologies can influence agriculture.
One thing that one might want to know is how weather information is ascertained by seed entrepreneurs. Would they simply pull information off the Internet or have their own satellites and means of getting that information?
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