Chairperson: Royboon Rassameethes, HII, Thailand, ([email protected])
Co-Chair: Adinarayana Jagarlapudi, IITB, India, ([email protected])
Co-Chair : Veerachai Tanpipat, HII-ThaiREN, Thailand ([email protected])
Co-Chair: Mitsuru Kameya, MAFFIN, Japan, ([email protected]
Co-Chair: Prashant Manandhar, ICT4D, USA/Nepal ([email protected])
Secretariat: Jittiporn Chantarojsiri, HII, Thailand, ([email protected])
Mailing List: [email protected]

Introduction 
The APAN Agricultural Working Group (AgWG) started at the Tsukuba APAN05 meeting held in March 1998 under the Earth Monitoring Group. A sub-group of AgWG became an independent working group at the Seoul APAN06 meeting in July 1998, so the next APAN55 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, the 26th anniversary will be officially celebrated. Since its inception, AgWG has been one of the most active working groups in the application area, maintaining close relationships with other working groups of APAN, such as Network Engineering WG (NEWG), Disaster Mitigation WG (DMWG), Open and Sharing Data WG (OSDWG), Cloud WG, IoT WG (Sensor Network WG), Security WG, e-Culture WG having overlapping membership with these groups.

The Agricultural Working Group aims to accelerate state-of-the-art agricultural and rural information research, utilizing the APAN network and technology. It also promotes research, education, and services projects in agricultural fields and rural areas attempts to bridge institutes, agencies, and start up new collaborations.

A characteristic of our Asian Pacific region is “Diversity” – the climate, the geography, the vegetation, the animals, the insects, the culture, the language, the food, and so on. Also, the world’s top five most populous countries are found in the Asia-Pacific region. In the food system, rice is the staple food for this enormous population and has a large harvest energy quantity per unit area compared with other major crops such as wheat and corn.

However, economic development and the increase of the population in our region demand expansion of the farmland, which is creating loss of other ecologically viable lands, resource degradation, and desertification. This leads to the importance and growth of cooperative research to develop mutually sustainable agriculture in this region. In addition, changing and inclement climatic conditions in the region are strongly affecting our Agriculture systems. Therefore, it is necessary to address and cooperate while we respect diversity in various countries. We, APAN Agriculture Working Group, believe and are proud that, these issues can be addressed with technology and the application of the Internet in our region. However, we never forget in our mind the challenges in overcoming the region’s digital divides.

With the food crisis due to the burgeoning population in developing countries, though the population on the earth has not exploded yet, even major powers are facing difficulties balancing productivity and environmental requirements. As the balance of food supply and demand is now inevitably under the strategy and control power of the world trading mechanism, it is almost meaningless to solve the crisis singly within a country. Only international sharing and cooperation for sustainable food productivity based on information sharing and mutual understanding can bring the solution.

In 2020, disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic forced drastic changes in our lifestyles and even demanded the adoption of digital systems in agriculture. And AgWG extended its activity to cover new relationships between urban and rural areas, and biodiversity with close collaboration with other WGs in APAN.

Objectives
We believe information, communication, and dissemination technologies (ICDT) can surely contribute to solving many of the issues described in the Introduction. First, ICDT such as the Internet, is now dynamically changing our lifestyle and social consciousness and provides us the best tool for information sharing and mutual communication. Second, we should not forget the possible contribution of information science to effective and stable production through several models such as crop growth prediction and decision support. Third, agricultural models, in conjunction with earth monitoring systems and wireless sensor networks in the field, can estimate the effects of climatic change in our region. Fourth, field monitoring systems are useful for high throughput phenotyping and can accelerate genetic breeding to make new varieties of crops resilient to climatic changes. Thus, the importance of the studies on Agroinformatics is undoubtedly increasing. The Asian-Pacific countries and regions are keeping the highest growth rate in the world and the requirement for food is abruptly changing from quantity to quality. In addition, the Asia-Pacific countries have agricultural features that are not common in the USA or EU countries. Rice dependency and farming scale are typical examples. Considering these, APAN Agricultural Working Group (AgWG) will target:

1. Promotion & intermediation of international research and educational projects for agriculture utilizing the APAN infrastructure.
2. Collaborate with OSDWG, Cloud WG, IoT WG, e-Culture WG, DMWG, and Security WG to increase innovations in Agriculture.
3. Promotion of international symposia and meetings for Agroinformatics.
4. Inviting researchers from other agricultural research fields such as crop breeding, biodiversity, rural hybridization, etc.
5. Encouragement of Compliance with international standards of Web Technology.

Those objectives are carried out with other related organizations such as The Asia-Pacific Federation for Information Technology in Agriculture (APFITA), The World Congress in Computer in Agriculture (WCCA), The Trans Eurasia Information Network (TEIN), The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), The Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nation (FAO), The Research Data Alliance (RDA), The Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN), The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) – Open Science and The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) WoT WG/IG.

Smart agriculture introduces a variety of booming ICDT technologies, which can promote agricultural research, production, management, etc., and encourage systematic and wide-area integrated development. These are many difficult works. Therefore, the exchange of construction, research and development experience, development flow, ideas, footprint, etc. of smart agriculture in different countries and research groups is important. It may also be a goal for APAN-AgWG.

Milestones/Actions
1. Climate Resilient Agriculture for Disaster Risk Reduction Project, the collaboration of AgWG and DMWG (Going to Phase II)
2.Achievement of Productive, Smart, Precision, and Sustainable Agriculture
3.Collaborate with APAN’s Network Engineering WG (NEWG), Disaster Mitigation WG (DMWG), Open and Sharing Data WG (OSDWG), Cloud WG, IoT WG (Sensor Network WG), Security WG, e-Culture WG
4.Collaborative workshops with other agricultural research fields ex. Crop Breeding and other APAN WGs
5.Collaboration on mitigation and adaptation research against climate change
6.Collaboration on local agriculture issues on environment, disaster, natural resources management
7.Encourage young researchers from APAN member countries and regions to attend and be a part of APAN meetings
8.Compiling database and information and distribute in APAN Data: Advanced Open Science in Asia Pacific web portal (https://data.apan.net/)