Solidaridad revival

[weynandkuijpers]

Solidaridad has been on the partner page for a very long time and we have been strategizing how we have create innovative and new ways to create benefit and income for smallholder farmers (cocoa, sugar cane, cotton etc.) around the world.

Both Solidaridad and ThreeFold felt a really strong bond by having values that are aligned and that create beautiful solutions to real-world problems. Jeroen (executive MD of the Solidaridad network) has become a good friend over the years and he called me a while ago and told me that he would be in Dubai to do his first in-person meeting with his oversight board in 2 years. He felt this would be a really good moment to kick-off and restart the activities between Solidaridad and ThreeFold.

We met and caught up and Jeroen invited ThreeFold to take a seat at the table of the Fair Data Inittiative.

Jeroen said: “I am happy to inform you that we are moving forward with our Fair Data initiative. As many initiatives around agri & food data exchange are currently seeing the light, it is prudent and urgent to ensure that the interests of smallholder farmers are taken into account and even put first. There is a real demand for coordination and clarity on this topic. We need you to participate and highlight the matter from your deep experience in building decentralized, distributed and decarbonized internet solutions that can deliver on the empowerment of data farming.”

Very much looking forward to this kick-off meeting in March.

[gosam]

Such a massive opportunity to disrupt (in a very good way) the global supply chain and support / empower smallholder farmers. So happy the conversation is alive again! Keep us posted.

[cryptoeducator]

Amazing @weynandkuijpers super happy you had the chance to team up with Jeroen again and be part of the fair data developments in conjunction with Solidaridad, further empowering small farmers with solutions and education !

[weynandkuijpers]

Hi @cryptoeducator (Lucien). Good to hear from you - and yes - you were instrumental to introduce us a few years ago in Arnhem! Hope you are well in these crazy times!

[sweden]

This is one of those projects why I wanted to support Threefold. For me it is what makes Threefold different is to partner with organisations that have a mission to make this world a better place.

[weynandkuijpers]

So here we are, almost a month later and we have had the fair data initiative round table. There were approximately 25 people the digital round table from various different backgrounds and guises. Amongst them agricultural innovators, banks, NGO’s and technology giants (Microsoft, Google and soon ThreeFold ) to name a few.

We spend 2x2hrs to go through an agenda that slowly but surely drove us towards answering the main question: “Do we want to organize a global multi-stakeholder roundtable for Fair Farm Data? Is there a common ground to join forces?”

The biggest debates were around ownership of data. Many companies present had spent years (and millions of dollars) to collect data from farmers and did not necessarily agree with the fact that the revenues from that collected data should benefit the farmers they collected the data from. However, most people agreed that the Farmers should own the data that they provide and should see some returns from sharing it, the challenge is what do we do with historically collected data.

This fundamental outcome in a large group of very different people and diverse field of companies is a huge motivation to keep on pushing this agenda and try to create a cluster (decentralized) of initiatives that act and govern based on the “farmer first” principles moving towards a fair data economy.

More to come, I’ll keep you posted.