The international Expert consultation meeting “Ethical, legal and policy aspects of data sharing affecting farmers” took place in Bonn in July 2018. The Global Forum on Agricultural Research and Innovation (GFAR), the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition initiative (GODAN) and the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) started this initiative to highlight the lack of in-depth exploration of the ethical and legal aspects related to the access and use of data by farmers and the sharing of farmers’ data, as well as that on the policy side poor farmers are not put at the centre of the stage.
The expert meeting was hosted by the German Federal Office for Agriculture and Food (BLE) and supported by the Kuratorium für Technik und Bauwesen in der Landwirtschaft (KTBL).
The objective of the meeting was to have an initial vision and to propose the next steps for a collective action on the enabling of farmers to harness the power of data-driven agriculture.
Discussions were stimulated by the presentations, among which the one from CEMA on “Agriculture 4.0: The way forward for the ag. machinery industry in Europe”. As example of good practice CEMA proposed the webtool of the EU project Smart-AKIS to promote the uptake of smart technologies, and the Code of Conduct as soft measure for data sharing.