Agriculture Working Group

Co-Chair : Teruaki Nanseki [ nanseki@agr.kyushu-u.ac.jp ]

Co-Chair : Masayuki Hirafuji [ hirafuji@affrc.go.jp ]

Mailing List : agriculture@apan.net

How to subscribe : Subcribe Here

Introduction :

The aim of Agricultural Working Group (AGWG) is to accelerate agricultural information research, utilizing the APAN network. It also promotes research and educational projects in agricultural fields and attempts to bridge institutes and start up new collaborations.

If expressing the characteristic of the Asian Pacific region straight, it is "the diversity" - the climate, the geography, the vegetation, the culture, the language, the food, and so on. Also, 60 % of the world population lives in our region. Specifically, the population of China - 1,260 million- and India -1,000 million - is enormous. The food to be keeping enormous population is rice. The rice has much harvest energy quantity per the unit area compared with the wheat and the corn. However, the economical development and the increase of the population in this region demand the expansion of the farm land and it is making the loss of the forest and desertification of the tillage progress. In our region, the importance of the cooperative research to develop mutual sustainable agriculture is rising. We must advance while we respect a diversity in the various countries for its purpose. We, APAN, is proud that these can be contributed to in the technology and the application of the Internet. However, we never forget the digital divide's overcoming in our mind.

Though the population on the earth has not been really exploded yet, we can see clues of food crisis; that is, the lack of food in some of the developing countries is chronic and even major powers are facing the difficulties to balance the productivity and the environmental requirement. As the balance of the food supply and demand is now inevitably under the strategy of the world trading mechanism and the control of the power, it is almost meaningless to solve the crisis within a country. Only the international sharing and cooperation for sustainable food productivity on the basis of information sharing and mutual understanding could bring the solution.

We believe that the information technology can surely contribute to the solution. First, the information communication technology such as the Internet that is now dynamically changing our life style and social consciousness, will provide us a best tool for the information sharing and mutual communication. Second, we should not forget the possible contribution of information science to effective and stable production by several models such as crop growth prediction and decision support. Thus, the importance of the studies on agroinformatics is undoubtedly increasing. The Asian-Pacific countries are keeping the highest growth rate in the world and the requirement on food is abruptly changing from quantity to quality. In addition, the Asia-Pacific countries have their individual agricultural features that are not common in the USA or EU countries. The rice-dependency and the farming scale are the typical examples. Considering these, APAN Agricultural Working Group (AGWG) will target;

Promotion & intermediation of international research and educational projects for agriculture utilizing the APAN infrastructure
Promotion of establishment of national organizations for agricultural informatics.
Managements of shared databases among APAN members and other groups, including several database mirrors.
Promotion of international symposia and meetings for agricultural informatics.
Acceleration of collaborative activities with other APAN-WGs.
Those objectives are carried out with other related organization such as Asian Federation for Information Technology in Agriculture (AFITA), World Congressin Computer in Agriculture (WCCA), and Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nation (FAO)

Milestones/Actions :

  The APAN Agricultural Working Group started at the APAN Tsukuba meeting held in March 1998. A sub-group of AGWG became an independent working group of the Earth Monitoring Group at the Seoul APAN meeting in June 1998.
  AGWG has been one of the most active working groups in the user community area since its establishment. It has been maintained close relationship with other working groups of APAN such as the Earth Monitoring WG, the Education WG, the Digital Library WG and BioInformatics, having overlapping membership with these groups.
  In addition to the projects being either undertaken or planned under AGWG, AGWG has been trying to establish a local AGWG group in each APAN country. Missions to Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, China and Philippines were sent in 1999. In most of the countries, a local meeting with the mission was held, gathering many people from fields related to agricultural information

The position paper will be posted on the APAN website. It will be a single view from the entire group. We take Prof. Kilnam Chon's proposal of the cluster. There are three main clusters. SEAsia cluster would have the countries in the neighboring countries. Oceanic cluster in Australia, North-east asia cluster is Korea, Japan., China, etc.

Contact Masayuki Hirafuji [ hirafuji@affrc.go.jp ] for more information.