The Rossi-Doria Lectures are held, once a year since 1997, by Italian and international distinguished scholars. Since 2014, the Lectures are organized by Rossi-Doria Centre.
The Rossi-Doria Lecture 2018, scheduled on Wednesday 12 December 2018 at Scuola di Economia e Studi Aziendali of Roma Tre University, was held by Josef Schmidhuber (Deputy Director Trade and Markets Division, UN Food and Agricultural Organization, FAO) on the theme “Key Trends and Challenges for Global Agricultural Markets in the Presence of Disruptive Technologies”.
The Lecture provided an overview of key results and drivers for global agricultural markets over the next 10 years and beyond. It presented prospective changes in supply and demand of agricultural markets, trade and prices.
In doing so, it also related the results of the outlook to selected goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDGs), such as the prevalence of undernourishment or the GHG emissions from agriculture. The main thrust of the outlook is based on the OECD/FAO medium-term projections for global agricultural markets.
Over and above these baseline results, a number of possible “disruptors” will be presented, all with a view to their potential of changing agricultural markets or their ability to accelerate the progress towards the SDGs.
The disruptive trends and technologies will cover a wide range of possible innovations in food and agriculture, commonly known as “Agriculture 4.0”. They include artificial intelligence and machine learning, Distributed Ledger Technology, or new ways and instruments of financing sustainable development in agriculture and the SDGs more generally.
The Rossi-Doria Lecture 2018 was also an opportunity to pay tribute to Manlio Rossi-Doria on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of his death.
The slides of the lesson are available at the following link.