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Browsing by Author "Gardezi, Maaz"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Artificial intelligence in farming: Challenges and opportunities for building trust
    Gardezi, Maaz; Joshi, Bhavna; Rizzo, Donna M.; Ryan, Mark; Prutzer, Edward; Brugler, Skye; Dadkhah, Ali (Wiley, 2023-05)
    Artificial intelligence (AI) represents technologies with human-like cognitive abilities to learn, perform, and make decisions. AI in precision agriculture (PA) enables farmers and farm managers to deploy highly targeted and precise farming practices based on site-specific agroclimatic field measurements. The foundational and applied development of AI has matured considerably over the last 30 years. The time is now right to engage seriously with the ethics and responsible practice of AI for the well-being of farmers and farm managers. In this paper, we identify and discuss both challenges and opportunities for improving farmers' trust in those providing AI solutions for PA. We highlight that farmers' trust can be moderated by how the benefits and risks of AI are perceived, shared, and distributed. We propose four recommendations for improving farmers' trust. First, AI developers should improve model transparency and explainability. Second, clear responsibility and accountability should be assigned to AI decisions. Third, concerns about the fairness of AI need to be overcome to improve human-machine partnerships in agriculture. Finally, regulation and voluntary compliance of data ownership, privacy, and security are needed, if AI systems are to become accepted and used by farmers.
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    Food retailer actions toward the National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health to promote nutrition security: Applicability of the Business Impact Assessment-Obesity as a monitoring tool
    DeNunzio, Maria; Houghtaling, Bailey; Kraak, Vivica; Gardezi, Maaz; Serrano, Elena L.; Misyak, Sarah A. (Society of Behavioral Medicine, 2024-10)
    The White House National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health (National Strategy) encourages actions across government and society to promote nutrition security. Nutrition security includes adequate food, diet quality, and equity, and food retail settings can promote these major concepts. Of all National Strategy whole-of-society calls to action, food retailers can contribute to 15 calls as key actors. However, there is currently no standardized monitoring tool to track food retailers’ commitments and actions toward the National Strategy to promote nutrition security. The Business Impact Assessment-Obesity and population-level nutrition (BIA-Obesity), a tool originally developed for corporate accountability monitoring, can be tailored for the National Strategy and nutrition security, given its standardized indicators and process to assess food company policies and commitments across six domains. We discuss the fit of the BIA-Obesity indicators for tracking food retailers’ commitments and actions across four pillars of the National Strategy. Existing indicators are appropriate to monitor components of Pillar 1: Improve Food Access and Affordability; Pillar 2: Integrate Nutrition and Health; Pillar 3: Empower All Consumers to Make and Have Access to Healthy Choices; and Pillar 5: Enhance Nutrition and Food Security Research. We suggest expanding current indicators to include equity, local foods, the digital food environment, and food waste reduction to improve alignment of the BIA-Obesity with the National Strategy. Application of the BIA-Obesity as an existing tool can facilitate data cohesion and more rapid assessment of the food retailer landscape to mutually meet nutrition security goals by 2030.
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    Prioritizing climate-smart agriculture: An organizational and temporal review
    Gardezi, Maaz; Michael, Semhar; Stock, Ryan; Vij, Sumit; Ogunyiola, Ayorinde; Ishtiaque, Asif (Wiley, 2022-03)
    Extant systematic literature reviews on the topic of climate smart agriculture (CSA) have mainly focused on two issues: reviewing framing of the CSA discourse in the academic and policy literature; and policy initiatives in the Global South that enhance the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices. Yet, there is little systematic investigation into how international organizations can help smallholder farmers manage agricultural systems to respond to climate change. Analyzing these organization's priorities and highlighting their knowledge gaps are crucial for designing future pathways of CSA. We intend to use this article to identify overarching CSA themes that can guide large international organizations to focus their CSA agenda in the hope of achieving goals associated with food security and sustainable intensification. We specifically ask the following question: How have the key CSA topics and themes emerged in the gray literature of international organizations between 2010 and 2020? We adopted a topic modeling approach to identify how six international organizations engaged with several topics related to CSA. Following the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach, we identified eight topics in the documents, representing four overarching themes: gender research, weather and climate, CSA management and food security. We found that there is insufficient discussion on the issues relating to governance measures and gender mainstreaming, with a larger focus on techno-managerial measures of CSA. We conclude that research and training related to CSA must offer opportunities for marginalized and disproportionately vulnerable populations to participate and raise their voices and share innovative ideas at different levels of governance. This article is categorized under: Climate and Development > Social Justice and the Politics of Development Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Institutions for Adaptation
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    Smallholder farmers' engagement with climate smart agriculture in Africa: role of local knowledge and upscaling
    Ogunyiola, Ayorinde; Gardezi, Maaz; Vij, Sumit (Taylor & Francis, 2022-04-21)
    Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is an important discourse among national governments in Africa and international policy circles to increase food productivity, build smallholder farmers' resilience to climate change, and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Despite presenting several potential economic and environmental benefits to farmers, its adoption among African smallholder farmers is low. Two important aspects that influence the adoption of CSA are inclusion and exclusion of farmers' local knowledge and how CSA is upscaled among smallholder farmers in Africa. This article uses a systematic review methodology to demonstrate that the existing literature (between 2010-2020) on CSA has substantially addressed issues that hinder its upscaling in Africa, such as heterogeneous farming systems, limited finance, high cost of agricultural inputs, and technology. However, only eight of 30 articles included in the systematic review indicate challenges pertaining to inclusion or exclusion of local knowledge in CSA practices and technologies. Policymakers and academics need to rethink how smallholder farmers' local knowledge can enhance opportunities and fulfil the potential to upscale CSA in Africa.