Earth Observations for Food Security Highlighted at ALASA

During March 9 to 12, the XVI ALASA International Conference took place in Mendoza, Argentina. ALASA is the Latin American Association of Agropecuarian insurance and every year they organize a massive event where different specialists in agropecuarian insurance from Latin American participate, both from the private and public sectors. The title of the conference was “New challenges of agricultural insurance: massiveness and disruptive technologies,” and NASA Harvest was invited to lead a workshop about new technologies.

Estefania Puricelli, NASA Harvest Lead Economist, presented some of the recent projects on behalf of partners of the consortium, highlighting the private public partnership between Swiss-Re, Green Triangle, Ag Ukraine and the University of Maryland, where the reinsurance sector and the remote sensing scientists work together in order to make crop cuts more efficient. The ongoing activities of the Agricultural Monitoring in the Americas (AMA) program, another NASA Harvest partner, were another area of focus during the presentation. AMA is the convening body of GEOGLAM Latino-américa (G-LA) and the AmeriGEOSS Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture sister initiatives, which aim to strengthen Earth observations (EO) for agricultural monitoring and capacity building in the Americas. In line with the mission of NASA Harvest, AMA strives to facilitate coordination between researchers, decision-makers, and all other stakeholders in order to best apply EO data to various agricultural and environmental challenges surrounding food security.

In Latin America, the use of remote sensing technology for agriculture has not reached its ceiling yet. The potential it has in the agricultural sector is enormous, especially with so many countries depending on the agricultural industry for both income and food security. Together, remote sensing technologies and the insurance sector can work towards a more accurate measurement of crops, providing opportunities to insurance users in particular as well as farmers in general.