Mobile Agriculture was on the agenda for the first time at Mobile World Congress 2012, the world’s largest event for the mobile industry where over 67,000 visitors attended from 205 countries. On Tuesday 28th February around 150 people from the mobile industry and the development sector attended the GSMA mAgri Programme’s seminar “Mobile Agriculture: The Market Opportunity” where a panel of leading practitioners shared emerging best practices and business rationale for developing Agricultural Value Added Services (Agri VAS)[1] in emerging markets. This post provides a summary of the seminar with highlights from each of the panelists. Videos of the presentations and a webinar showing analysis and highlights are available to watch on the GSMA mAgri website. 
Mobile Agriculture was on the agenda for the first time at Mobile World Congress 2012, the world’s largest event for the mobile industry where over 67,000 visitors attended from 205 countries. On Tuesday 28th February around 150 people from the mobile industry and the development sector attended the GSMA mAgri Programme’s seminar “Mobile Agriculture: The Market Opportunity” where a panel of leading practitioners shared emerging best practices and business rationale for developing Agricultural Value Added Services (Agri VAS)[1] in emerging markets. This post provides a summary of the seminar with highlights from each of the panelists. Videos of the presentations and a webinar showing analysis and highlights are available to watch on the GSMA mAgri website.
Bringing valuable insight from the mobile network operator perspective, Marc Ricau, Vice-President of Country and Partnerships at Orange, provided a clear case for why Orange is developing Agri VAS in its emerging markets. With a presence in 18 African countries where between 60 and 70 per cent of their potential customer base live in rural areas and are involved in agriculture, Mr Ricau spoke of Orange’s need to shift the focus from urban to rural customers. This means extending rural coverage, a job that operators are equipped to do. However, to create successful information and advisory services for farmers, Orange recognized that forming partnerships with agricultural organizations is critical. Although the services Orange plan to launch will be commercially driven rather than CSR initiatives, Mr Ricau drew attention to the potential for mobile to boost agricultural productivity and cited that the agriculture sector contributes 15-20% of Africa’s GDP.
Read more at: http://www.businessfightspoverty.org/profiles/blogs/the-market-opportunity-for-mobile-agriculture-highlights-from