Food Security can be reformed by the 4th Industrial Revolution

Food security is not a new concept; it's a problem that we face globally. We know that hunger and malnutrition need to be addressed. These issues have been identified as a significant problem and are central to the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Annually, farmers produce enough food to feed everyone across the world. However, our food’s journey from farm to table isn’t always straightforward. Food security is compromised early on by food loss in different parts of the agricultural system. Harvesting, handling, processing, packaging and distribution all contribute to this phenomenon. This produce often ends up in a landfill rather than being distributed to those who need it. Food loss occurs at especially high volumes in Africa, as not every farmer has the knowledge, equipment or systems to prevent it.

Agricultural practices are another area of concern. With the global focus on food security, there has been a big drive to ensure that food is available to everyone. For this reason, many farmers have adopted monocropping practices to improve food supply. Growing the same crop year after year on the same land may deliver higher yields, but it also means that communities eat less varied diets and have access to fewer nutrients. Although hunger may be partially addressed by adopting monocropping practices, malnutrition remains a problem.

COVID-19 has introduced new threats to food security since the beginning of 2020. Labour shortages complicate food production and distribution. In Africa, women produce 70% of the food available to the market. Women are also often the primary caregivers in their communities, tasked with looking after the ill at the expense of participating in the labour market. The shortage of women’s labour has a devastating impact on food loss on the African continent.

Food waste takes place much later in the farm-to-table journey than food loss does. Wastage occurs in the supermarket and the home. Large volumes of fresh produce from supermarkets end up on the landfill, as they haven’t been bought before the best-before date. Large-scale discounting on fresh produce encourages higher income consumers to buy more than they need. This means that most of that food goes to waste in people’s fridges, rather than being consumed by those who would actually benefit from it. Consumers’ purchasing behaviours have also changed in response to COVID-19. The phenomenon of fear-induced buying motivated by COVID-19 events threatens food supply and availability.

The consequences of food loss and food waste are dire. These phenomena both contribute to the increase of waste in our landfills. Lost or wasted food could have been managed to serve people better, but instead it places further pressure on the environment. The annual carbon footprint of wasted food is approximately 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalents. It’s clear that we need a new way of looking at this problem.

The Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) and Comotion are working together to develop a solution to this widespread issue. Through harnessing the power of the 4th Industrial Revolution, they are developing a digital platform to address the issues in the agricultural chain.

FANRPAN is an Africa-wide network that brings existing policy institutions with technical expertise together with food, agriculture and natural resources (FANR) stakeholders to collaborate in addressing policy bottlenecks. It promotes research to generate evidence that is used to inform and influence policy processes at national and regional levels, and provides a platform for multi-stakeholder dialogue on FANR issues to drive change.

Comotion uses technology to provide digital solutions to real-world problems. They develop innovative and responsive systems to meet the needs of their clients.

Together, FANRPAN and Comotion have come up with a “smart” digital technology platform that will enable actors along the food supply chain (e.g., producers, processors, distributors, retailers, wholesalers and consumers) to collectively reduce food waste. Called the Digital Food Bin, this app will allow users to interact with the food production cycle in a new and profound way. The food chain is simplified on the app to include three main sectors: contributors, logistics and beneficiaries. The opportunities in this chain are almost endless.

Contributors may be farmers with excess crops, or supermarkets who have more food products than they can sell before their expiry dates. Logistics are entities that move food products, whilst beneficiaries are end users of the food. For example, beneficiaries could include school and community feeding schemes, small-scale livestock farmers in need of animal feed, or bioenergy plants producing clean energy from food waste.

The contributor makes their excess food products available to the Digital Food Bin app, either for a fee or as a donation. Beneficiaries post their need for food products on the app, where excess products are matched with beneficiaries’ needs. Logistics complete the transaction by availing transport services between contributors and beneficiaries.

The Digital Food Bin opens up a unique opportunity to reduce food loss and waste, as it interacts with a number of components of the food production and distribution journey. A linear relationship from farm to table becomes a cycle that holistically improves food security by reducing loss and waste that contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.

Not only does this address a real-world problem, but the Digital Food Bin will also allow FANRPAN to collect relevant data on the agriculture sector to inform policy processes. This data can then be used to identify gaps in policies, education and support that are needed to achieve SDG 2 on ending hunger in the world.

This project is in process and further details will be shared in due course.

For more information about FANRPAN and their efforts, you can visit them here: https://fanrpan.org

Como Auth: Improving Insurance Companies’ Efficiency and User Security Instantly

Comotion offers a module approach to building life insurance applications. Our digital business offerings assist ambitious life insurance companies in innovating their business models. For example, using Comotion's platform, financial institutions can reduce the time to market and make information processing more efficient and straightforward. Comotion allows insurance companies to select their pre-built modules and connect them to form their unique 'plug-in' application, which uses a business's custom logic and processes.

The Problem

Financial institutions have access to more solutions than ever before due to the rise of cloud computing and SaaS (Software as a Service) applications. While this is positive for growth, the increase of use brings the proliferation of threats to data security. As a result, company data is not always safe!

Not all threats are technical; in fact, most threats surround users' management and multiple profiles. A complexity that increases with every new system a company uses.

The Solution

Comotion's component solution to the life insurance industry offers "Como Auth". Como Auth is a single sign-on and authentication component. It allows life insurance companies access to the fleet of SaaS applications that they use. This means companies can offer their products and services while keeping user control centrally. In addition, Como-Auth can be used on its own and integrated into any existing company software.

In the imaginary circumstance that an employee is leaving the business, usually, the company takes responsibility for removing access across all applications. But using Como Auth means that a company can remove access centrally and retain access.

Como Auth comes built-in with security features such as multi-factor authentication, blocking brute force attacks and more!

What happens if you don’t control centrally?

Imagine the same scenery but without single sign-on functionality. Further, still, imagine forgetting to revoke access on one of the applications the company uses? Technically, this is classified as a data breach!

More complications arise when employees are forced to memorise countless usernames and passwords. Surely this will increase the complexity and stress for your company?

View of Success

Como Auth, as part of our digital business offering, offers companies can centrally manage access to Comotion's life solution and reduce the risk of data breaches. This means no more multiple logins and forgotten passwords. As a result, user efficiencies are sure to increase steadily!

Financial institutions that can promise complete data protection and user security to their clients and employees is invaluable.

Comotion Business Solutions specialises in helping companies reinvent vital aspects of their business models using solutions like Como Auth. Get in touch with us about unlocking the Comotion LIfe approach's benefits to your business.

Making Sense of COVID-19 | Dash and Actuarial Society of South Africa

Comotion Dash is a product that helps the market deal with data visualization, management, and cloud storage. This enables businesses to make better decisions based on the data their company generates, but it also offers this solution to their clients – providing businesses with a stronger product offering.

A significant feature of Comotion Dash is that it can work with large amounts of data from various sources. This makes it a handy tool for anyone who needs to collect, organize and provide conclusions from large data sets.

The Actuarial Society of South Africa (ASSA) has found that COVID-19 provided them with more information than usual that they needed to dissect and interpret. The death rate in South Africa increased significantly from March 2020, and it remained high during 2021. As a result, the number of life insurance policy claims has increased. Underwritten policies are awarded to individuals found to have no significant comorbidities after undergoing comprehensive health and lifestyle assessment. These individuals tend to maintain better health, as they have access to better health care.

Comotion Dash was able to assist the ASSA with sorting this data. The data pool was collected from five different life insurance companies, notably the largest companies in this sector in South Africa. This data pool represents about 90% of the South African individual life insurance premiums. In the 15 months between March 2020 and May 2021, there were 15 343 deaths.

The actuaries from ASSA were able to use Comotion Dash to analyse and present this data. The information is presented in dashboards that automatically refresh when the information sources send new data. This enabled ASSA to take a look at what was happening with the increase in death claims. The system has cloud storage, so they didn’t need to set up a data warehouse to be able to pull this information together, saving investments into their infrastructure for this project.

The platform enables easy sorting of the information so that different sets of data can be easily compared and analyzed, so that conclusions can be made. ASSA was able to discern that there was a larger increase in the death rate from what was expected. The insured sector saw more than 4 times greater deaths than what was expected at the peak of the second wave. It was interesting to note that this increase was higher compared to the excess deaths experienced by the population. The data also showed that only 15% of deaths associated with these claims were reported as COVID-19 deaths. In total, there was an increase of 65% in deaths above the average that was seen for 2018 and 2019. They did note that some of the other deaths reported could be COVID-19 related, but had been reported as cases of pneumonia, natural causes, and organ failure. The data and research have shown that between 85 and 95% of the unattributed natural causes of death could well be COVID-19 related.

The ability to dissect this information easily after collection gives the ASSA decision-making power going forward. Using this information, actuaries in South Africa can determine accurate premiums that should be asked for life insurance policies to help make sure that there are sufficient capital reserves available for these claims. This is an important aspect of consideration for the life insurance industry so that they can keep their offering in line with the times, and service their clients when they need to claim.

ASSA continues to use Comotion Dash on this project as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, so that they can publish up-to-date information so sorely needed by the industry.

Anja Kuys from the ASSA had this to say about her experience with Comotion Dash:

“Comodash is the innovative tool we used to publish the COVID-19 dashboard to the South African life insurance industry. The ease at which we can now combine monthly data from the various insurers and derive insights at an industry level is commendable. The insurers that contributed data can rest assured that their data is safe and protected. It was a pleasure working with the team at Comotion, they were as committed as us to the end result, their work ethic is second-to-none and great to work with.”

For more information on how Comotion Dash can work for your business needs, request a demo from our website.

References:

Actuarial Society of South Africa (ASSA)