Digital Opportunities for Better Agricultural Policies
Recent digital innovations provide opportunities to deliver better policies for the
agriculture sector by helping to overcome information gaps and asymmetries, lower
policy-related transaction costs, and enable people with different preferences and
incentives to work better together. Drawing on ten illustrative case studies and unique
new data gathered via an OECD questionnaire on agri-environmental policy organisations'
experiences with digital tools, this report explores opportunities to improve current
agricultural and agri-environmental policies, and to deliver new, digitally enabled
and information-rich policy approaches. It also considers challenges that organisations
may face to make greater use of digital tools for policy, as well as new risks which
increased use of digital tools may bring. The report provides practical advice on
how policy makers can address challenges and mitigate risks to ensure digital opportunities
for policy are realised in practice. Finally, the report briefly considers the broader
regulatory and policy environment underpinning digitalisation of the agriculture sector,
with the view to ensuring that use of digital tools for agricultural and agri-environmental
policy remains coherent with the digitalisation of agriculture more generally.
Published on September 23, 2019