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Ending global hunger has long been a critical goal for the global community. When the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals were released in 2014, ending hunger, food insecurity and all forms of malnutrition formed SDG2.
Though there has been some progress in the fight against hunger – ongoing conflicts, climate change, economic downturns and the COVID-19 pandemic have been major barriers to achieving SDG2. As of 2020, according to the UN, 720 and 811 million people globally faced hunger, and current estimates suggest that 660 million people may still face hunger in 2030.
Professor Salah Sukkarieh, a robotics engineer at the University of Sydney’s Australian Centre for Field Robotics, will this week speak at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Global Conference on Sustainable Plant Production in Rome (2-4 November).
Co-chairing the conference’s Mechanization and Digitalization session, he will discuss how agricultural robotics and AI can support nutrition security and increase productivity and yields, drawing on his team’s development of autonomous agricultural robots that have been designed to improve food security in the Asia-Pacific.
The team has developed Digital Farmhand, a small, autonomous, electric tractor-like vehicle can assist smallholder farmers to improve their productivity and yields.
“It’s projected that APAC will need to increase food production by up to 77 percent to feed its communities by 2050. Bold steps must be taken to accelerate progress towards addressing the major drivers of food insecurity, malnutrition, and equal access to food – as well as drive smart solutions that give back power to local farmers,” said Professor Sukkarieh.
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