---
# System prepended metadata

title: Introduction

---

# Introduction

The APAN Agricultural Working Group (AgWG) started at the APAN Tsukuba meeting held in March 1998. The Earth Monitoring Group, a sub-group of AgWG became an independent working group at the Seoul APAN meeting in July 1998. Since its inception, AgWG has been one of the most active working groups in the application area, maintaining close relationships with other working groups of APAN, such as the Earth Monitoring WG, IoT WG (Sensor Network WG), e-Culture WG, Disaster Mitigation WG, and a new Open and Sharing Data WG, having overlapping membership with these groups.

The aim of Agricultural Working Group is to accelerate agricultural and rural information research, utilizing the APAN network. It also promotes research, educational, and services projects in agricultural fields and/or rural area attempts to bridge institutes and start up new collaborations.

A characteristic of our Asian Pacific region is "the diversity" – the climate, the geography, the vegetation, the animals, the insects, the culture, the language, the food, and so on. Also, the world's top five most populous countries are found in the Asia-Pacific region. In the food system, rice is the staple food for this enormous population and has a large harvest energy quantity per the unit area compared with other major crops such as wheat and corn.

However, economic development and the increase of the population in our region demands expansion of the farmland, which is creating loss of other ecologically viable lands, resource degradation, and desertification. This leads to the importance and growth in cooperative research to develop mutual sustainable agriculture in this region. In addition, changing and inclement climatic conditions in the region is strongly affecting our Agriculture systems. Therefore, it is necessary to address and cooperate while we respect diversity in the various countries. We, APAN Agriculture Working Group, believe, and are proud that, these issues can be addressed with technology and application of the Internet in our region. However, we never forget in our mind the challenges in overcoming the region's digital divides.

With the food crisis due to burgeoning population in developing countries, though the population on the earth has not been really exploded yet, even major powers are facing difficulties balancing the productivity and environmental requirements. As the balance of food supply and demand are now inevitably under the strategy and control power of the world trading mechanism, it is almost meaningless to solve the crisis singly within a country. Only international sharing and cooperation for sustainable food productivity on a basis of information sharing and mutual understanding can bring the solution.

In 2020, disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic forced drastic changes on our lifestyles and even demanded the adoption of digital systems in agriculture. And AgWG extended its activity to cover new relationship between urban and rural areas, and bio-diversity with close collaboration to other WGs in APAN.
