Beyond pilot success: Why scalability remains agtech’s biggest challenge to solve APAC’s carbon emissions battle – expert panel
The panel – which comprised Rize CEO Dhruv Sawhney, ADB Deputy Director-General Cathy Marsh, String Bio CEO & Founder Ezhil Subbian and Anterra Capital Managing Partner Adam Andres – convened at the recent Asia Pacific Agri-Food Innovation Summit in Singapore to discuss decarbonisation in food and agriculture systems.
A strong recurring theme of discussion was the danger of targeting too much focus and investment into technologies without fully considering the larger picture and accessibility for those who needed progress the most – namely the smallholder farmers in developing markets.
“There is no doubt that in the agritech market today, scalability now needs to be seen as key beyond just technology and innovation,” Marsh told the floor.
“Without scale, no amount of technology is going to be sufficient no matter how wonderful it is. Singapore is a particularly important ecosystem to test and find relevant solutions to scale up, but at the end of the day these need to be scaled up.”
Many technologies in the past decade have achieved strong success in theoretical and pilot settings, but not that many have actually made it to being used on a widespread scale by farmers in the region, added Sawhney.
“We could stack up all the agritech innovations here in this region and there are probably thousands of them that have reached meaningful success at the pilots or demo stages – but after that, how many have actually made it to scale? That is where the struggle really is,” he said.
“This clearly shows that there is a need to rewire the business model for these farmers. Imagine if there could be improvements of just 5% to 10% in terms of cost reduction and then something similar in terms of yield – this would be an increase of about 20% in net income for them, which would be an absolute gamechanger as they would then be more open to the new innovations aimed at decarbonisation and sustainable change.
“It is however important to remember that this cannot be a one-size-fits-all generic approach, and solutions need to be crafted for every crop – agriculture will not work with a single standard template, that’s not how it operates.”
Carbon core
Another strong recurring theme of the discussion revolved around the lack of focus placed on decarbonisation in favour of other sustainability areas such as alternative proteins and carbon change.
“Decarbonisation in agriculture, say in rice, is likely not getting as much attention as it should as the levels in terms of parts per million (ppm) are not as in-your-face as some of the other sectors,” Subbian said.
“That said, the political will is there to improve issues like this, as is the capital and investor interest, so it really is about delivering something that can ensure ease of adoption in terms of application and pricing for all stakeholders in the supply chain.”
Andres added that there is value in learning from past attempts, such as how the alternative protein sector attempted to make its mark.
“Alternative protein was very successful in terms of bringing food supply chain issues to everyone’s attention, there is no doubt about that,” he said.
“Unfortunately there is an important factor to note here in that food is really very emotional and personal to consumers, and the approach of attacking an entire sector that has been around for so long and is so deeply ingrained in so many people’s lives may not have been the best one, and almost affected the entire messaging – there are lessons that agtech can definitely learn from here.”
