At the Global Forum for Innovations in Agriculture (GFIA) Dr David Bergvinson, Director General, ICRISAT, spoke on ICT for Sustainable Agriculture. He highlighted the importance of leveraging digital technology to accelerate the development and delivery of farmer-preferred products and services, to increase agricultural productivity of the smallholder farmers, in a sustainable and equitable manner in the developing world.

A roundtable discussion titled ‘Towards a Global Agribusiness and Innovation Platform for promoting value chains and entrepreneurship development on Nutri-Cereals and Legumes’ was chaired by Dr Kiran Sharma, CEO, ICRISAT Agribusiness and Innovation Platform (AIP). Public and private sector organizations participated in the roundtable. The need for an ecosystem to make agriculture profitable and attractive to youth, through developing sustainable agribusiness enterprises was highlighted. Use of genomic tools, appropriate postharvest technologies, promoting mixed cropping systems, smart choices around nutrition, value chain analysis towards understanding the gaps including understanding of the critical ecological footprint indices, ICT etc., were some of the important components identified as being essential towards enabling such an ecosystem.