Sustainable Food Value Chain for Rural Development: The Use of Smart Agriculture

Dear Colleagues,

The agricultural and food value chain includes production, handling and storage, processing and packaging, distribution, and consumption. This encompasses agricultural inputs to deliver food products and services to consumers. Smart agriculture has been acknowledged as an important means of solving the sustainability and food security problems along the food value chain. This creates off-farm jobs and income and contributes to sustainable rural development. Hence, governments of many countries are adopting various policy measures to promote smart agriculture. However, the adoption of smart agriculture is still in its early stage, especially among smallholder farmers. In addition, the prevalence of smart agriculture may lead to structural changes such as capital-intensification of farming, digitalization and commercialization of collected data, redesign of supply chains and associated institutions, access to sufficient financial resources and technologies to invest, and income inequality among farm households.

This Special Issue seeks to bring together papers that enhance the further development of smart agriculture to improve and ensure sustainability performance of food value chain for rural development. Papers on challenges and countermeasures for promoting smart agriculture, policy measures, and case studies on smart agriculture for smallholder farmers and agribusiness along food value chain are very welcome.

Prof. Dr. Ching-Cheng Chang
Prof. Dr. Witsanu Attavanich
Guest Editors

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