Digitalization of the Greece Agriculture

Greece performance in terms of digitization is below the EU average. On the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) Greece ranks 27th out of the 28 EU Member States in 2017 - 2020, indicating a low integration of more sophisticated digital technologies throughout the economy. The country’s performance in digital public services and digital skills remains low, a fact that can act as a barrier for further development of the digital economy and society.

To reverse the above negative trends, the Greek government during 2016, established a new Ministry for Digital Policy, Telecommunications, and Media with the responsibility for the policy-making, design, overall coordination and monitoring of the implementation of the ICT investments in the country. This Ministry is thus responsible for setting the horizontal policy, while other Ministries are responsible for implementing various measures in accordance to the National Digital Strategy 2016 –2021, launched also during 2016.

At the same time Greece is gradually recovering from a steep ten-year recession period that reduced GDP by approximately 25%. GDP grew by 1.9% during 2018. The Government’s revised growth strategy aims at transforming the country’s economic model based on exports and high value-added sectors such as energy, food, agriculture, logistics and life sciences. Digital technologies are considered as a key factor for this transformation, while there is an increased realization by all stakeholders of the need for an industry 4.0 type of strategy and for increasing collaboration between stakeholders. However, the level of coordination between the various ministries and stakeholders is currently rather week.

Overall, at least EUR 341million have been made available in the period 2017-2018 under the different pillars of the Digitizing European Industry (DEI) initiative and support mechanisms. Further on, while large and multinational companies appear to keep up with technological evolutions, public administration and particularly SMEs seem to fall behind. To address this issue, several initiatives have been launched during 2018 related mainly to pillars 2and 3 of the DEI, focusing mainly on SMEs and startups, such as the measures a) Digital Step, b) Digital Jump, c)

Digital transformation of the agricultural sector and d) Research-Create-Innovate, while a number of important initiatives were also announced with the aim to digitize public administration. Given that these initiatives have only been launched recently, or are still in the phase of implementation, the impact is limited so far, but in time they are expected to increase the pace of digitalization of the Greek economy. The same holds for the increasing number of support mechanisms available particularly for SME’s and start-ups, as the tax relief and venture fund schemes. Further initiatives have been launched focusing on upgrading the digital skills of the work force, while gradually the regulatory framework is becoming more conducive to the digital age, following trends across the EU (transposition of EU regulations).

However, when it comes to regulation, important barriers still exist impeding the digital transformation, such as conflicting legislation and overlapping responsibilities between various national bodies. Finally, Government support for the digitization of industry is expected to gain in momentum in the near future, with several measures already under preparation, such as the National action for the participation of Greek industry in the 4th Industrial revolution, the establishment of a fund under the New Economy Development Fund ("TANEO") for investments in firms active in sectors related to the 4thIndustrial Revolution and training schemes in the field of ICT (Software, databases, IT Security etc).

Greece is progressing toward developing the infrastructure for "smart" agriculture and is one of the few EU countries that has a national strategy for this sector, investing in innovation with new digital tools that will apply even to small farmers.

The “digital transformation of Greek agriculture” project is the first national digital agriculture infrastructure in Europe and is developed by the Ministry of Digital Policy, Telecommunications and Media, in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture, based on precision farming technologies.

According to the new delivery model of the post-2020 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), EU member states will have to come up with their own national strategies adjusted to their different needs.

The digital transformation of the agricultural sector is a one-way street in which we must work altogether: the state, the academic community, rural businesses, cooperatives, agricultural advisers and, first of all, farmers, both young and old, in order to create the country’s agricultural growth prospects towards in the post-2020 CAP,” Stelios Rallis, Secretary General for Digital Policy at the Ministry of Digital Policy, told EURACTIV.com.

The project is designed to cover, initially, half of the arable land in Greece, about 15 million acres and 20 of the country’s most exported crops, including cotton, grain, rice, cotton, olive, vines and citrus.

The platform will gather data from existing meteorological stations of the National Meteorological Service, the Earth observation satellite systems of the Copernicus program and from the 6,500 earth stations that will be installed in the 13 regions of the country in three phases.

“With the help of 6,500 earth stations, data collection and mobile telephony networks, data related to agricultural production, such as on temperature, air, soil, and water, are collected and transmitted to the platform,” the Greek official said.

The data will then be classified into a data warehouse in cloud infrastructures where they will be processed in order to provide tailored services to meet the needs of each producer.

“Farmers will be receiving, via a SMS and not necessarily to a smartphone, warnings for extreme weather events and in the second year, personalised information on the irrigation, fertilisation and plant protection of the crops,” Rallis noted.

Farmers will also have access to electronic applications that will allow them to digitise crop data, such as when and how much water was used, and the timing and volume of rainfall.

The government also wants to engage the academic community in this digitisation effort, focusing on the future of agronomists.

For this reason, the digital policy ministry signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Agricultural University of Athens, which provides for the training of agronomists in new technologies and in particular on agricultural data collection and processing platforms.