In December 2024, at an international seminar, I suggested that transforming food systems would require more than a shared diagnosis. I proposed a more concrete agenda, capable of combining sustainability, innovation, investment, technical cooperation and the active participation of the private sector.
The recent IFAMA 2026 and FAO Smart Farming 2026 conferences show that this discussion has matured. Not because the underlying problem has changed, but because the type of institutional, technological and productive response that will need to be built is becoming clearer.
The IFAMA World Conference emphasized that agrifood systems must respond simultaneously to climate uncertainty, price volatility, geopolitical tensions, structural demographic changes and changes in consumer preferences, sanitary risks and new technologies.
The FAO Global Conference on Smart Farming, held a few days later in Rome, addressed the same challenge from another angle: how to leverage data, artificial intelligence, digitalization, precision agriculture and new technological tools to build more sustainable, productive and inclusive agrifood systems.
The convergence between the two conferences is significant.
IFAMA spoke of resilience. FAO spoke of smart farming. But both pointed toward the same conclusion: agrifood transformation will not be successful if it is limited to large companies, large technology platforms or large production units. It must also reach smallholder farmers.
This is a decisive point.
Smallholder farmers cannot be treated as marginal beneficiaries of agricultural modernization. They are an essential part of production, rural employment, food security, territorial occupation and social stability. If they are left out of the new agrifood economy, the transformation will be incomplete. And it will probably also be politically fragile.
Smart farming cannot consist only of introducing sensors, digital platforms, satellite imagery, artificial intelligence or traceability systems. It must translate into better production decisions, greater access to markets, reduced risks, adequate financing, higher incomes and stronger adaptive capacity.
An important message from these conferences resonates here: the transformation of agrifood systems requires a new generation of public-private partnerships.
The public sector retains an indispensable role. It must define priorities, build regulatory frameworks, invest in public goods, strengthen sanitary and phytosanitary institutions, promote physical and digital infrastructure, reduce asymmetries and guide the transformation toward development objectives.
But the private sector brings investment, market knowledge, management capacity, technology, innovation, logistics, financing, scale and contact with real value chains. Without it, many initiatives will remain pilot exercises that show possibilities but are insufficient to transform systems.
The problem is no longer only to generate innovation, but to scale it. For years, valuable projects, platforms, demonstration experiences and technological solutions have been developed. Many work under controlled conditions or in specific territories. The challenge is to turn them into sustainable, replicable and financially viable models.
For that, more sophisticated partnerships are needed.
It is not enough to invite the private sector to a dialogue table. Nor is it enough to design public programs to which companies are later invited to join. Modern partnerships must be structured around shared objectives, clear responsibilities, appropriate incentives and verifiable results.
They must allow governments to provide direction, companies to invest, academia to contribute knowledge, financial institutions to reduce risks, international organizations to catalyze cooperation and producer organizations to participate from the design stage of the solutions.
Inclusion is not achieved simply by declaring that smallholder farmers are important. It is achieved when solutions respond to their real constraints: scale, limited access to credit, low connectivity, lack of technical assistance, logistical difficulties, scarce market information, climate vulnerability and limited capacity to absorb technological or financial risks.
An effective smart farming agenda must start from those conditions. It must ask how technological adoption is financed, who provides technical assistance, how data are shared, how producers are protected, how quality improvements are rewarded, how access to markets is facilitated and how benefits are distributed within the value chain.
Data governance will be especially important.
Agricultural data are becoming a new strategic asset. They can help improve yields, anticipate diseases, optimize the use of water and fertilizers, verify origin, reduce losses, measure the environmental footprint and facilitate financing. But they can also generate new asymmetries.
For that reason, smart farming needs rules, institutions and trust. It needs interoperability, data protection, open standards whenever possible, transparency in the use of information and mechanisms that allow the value generated by data to also reach those who work the land.
IFAMA added another fundamental element: resilience. Agrifood transformation cannot be measured only by efficiency. A system can be efficient and, at the same time, fragile. It can produce a great deal, yet depend excessively on a limited number of inputs, markets, logistics routes, technologies or suppliers.
Resilience requires diversification, adaptive capacity, reliable institutions, more robust supply chains, better climate risk management, early warning systems, adequate financing and producers with real capacity to respond to shocks.
In this context, smallholder farmers must also be seen as part of the system’s resilience. Integrating them better is not only a social obligation. It is a condition for building agrifood systems that are more balanced, more territorially rooted and less vulnerable.
Latin America has an evident opportunity here.
The region has natural resources, productive capacity, agroindustrial knowledge, dynamic companies, relevant technology institutions and a growing role in global food security. But that position alone does not guarantee future leadership. The agrifood advantage of the coming years will increasingly depend on the capacity to combine primary production with technology, traceability, the bioeconomy, financing, sustainability, digital services and institutional innovation.
Argentina, Brazil and other countries in the region can play a much more ambitious role. They can become platforms for solutions in smart farming, the inclusion of smallholder farmers, the sustainable management of resources, quality certification, the bioeconomy and global food security.
But to do so, it will be necessary to build public-private partnerships with greater ambition and greater discipline. Cooperation must help build capacities, not replace them. It must allow beneficiaries to take off on their own, enable models to work beyond the initial project and allow local institutions to take ownership of the results.
In 2024, that was precisely the direction that seemed necessary to take. Today, the international debate confirms it and makes it more urgent. We need to do more and do it better. And soon.
