The Fair and Smart Data (FSD) spearhead held their third hybrid event on Friday 28th October 2022, with speakers from industry, academia, and non-profit sector, namely:

• Shatadru Chattopadhayay, Managing Director of Solidaridad Asia
• Jelmer van de Mortel, Head of Acorn at Rabobank
• Freija van Lent, PhD candidate Data Analytics and Digitalisation at the School of Business and Economics of Maastricht University

Shatadru started the presentation session by talking about the cycle of “agricultural poverty.” He demonstrated how our economic systems create barriers to the simple solutions that come to our minds. For instance, increasing productivity for smallholders leads to decreasing prices but helps bring new customers to business organizations. In pursuit of new demand, farmers usually resort to unsustainable farming practices. These unsustainable and demand-driven factors subsequently worsen poverty amongst the smallholders. Special highlights from field stories in Pakistan and other parts of the world showed how climate change presents further complexities. Some of the highlighted economic challenges related to smallholder farming were imbalanced power relations in supply chains leading to scrutinised data control and valorisation, unfair distribution of profits, lack of vertical integration, and ignorance about the importance of women in this entire ecosystem. Shatadru emphasized that the total value [CR(1] share of smallholder farmers in global markets decreased from 8.8% in 1996 to 6.5% in 2015 (decrease of 26%), while the production costs for farmers went up almost 72% during the same time. As a direction into the future, some key areas of improvement were suggested such as regenerative agriculture, higher collective bargaining power for farmers, alternative business models, fair data, and actual cost (incl. external cost) accounting.

In the final presentation, Jelmer introduced the flagship project of Rabobank, ACORN. His presentation was a demonstration of a project-based intervention within smallholder communities and its findings. ACORN is an acronym for “Agroforestry carbon renewal units (CRUs) for organic restoration of nature”. In this project, the smallholders are provided with ‘high integrity CRUs,’ i.e., highly specific trees, in a bid to provide additional income and fight land degradation. It builds on the practice of agroforestry, which proves to have significant benefits for many farmers and their ecosystems. While strategies to reduce emissions are critical, reaching net zero requires the active removal of carbon, including historical carbon. Agroforestry in this regard has much to offer, in addition to helping the farmers with direct and key interventions. Furthermore, the farmers unlock the potential of earning an additional 80-120 euros per hectare per year from the voluntary carbon markets through this programme. Although thriving, these carbon markets are often much beyond the reach of smallholders but are made easier to access via ACORN. Through remote sensing capabilities, ACORN is also generating high-quality ecological data for greater use.