ISIDORA CIRIC (ABU DHABI)
Agriculture innovation took centre stage on Wednesday, as Bill Gates, Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Mariam Almheiri, Head of International Affairs Office at the Presidential Court, met in Abu Dhabi to assess the progress of initiatives under the landmark $200 million fund launched at COP28.
The partnership between the foundation and the UAE, announced in Dubai last year, aims to combat climate-driven threats to global food systems through the power of AI and technology, by helping smallholder farmers in low-income countries build resilience through agricultural research, scaled innovations and technical assistance.
Nearly a year after the fund's launch, four recipients gathered at Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi to present their progress to Gates and Almheiri, showcasing initiatives including AI-driven advisory tools, advanced pest management, precise weather forecasting, and targeted support for vulnerable farming communities.
Recipients of the funding credited the collaboration for accelerating critical projects, highlighting its role in connecting research with practical applications that directly impact farming communities worldwide.
"We wouldn't be here without this partnership," Amir Jina, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the University of Chicago and AIM for Scale Technical Panel Chair, told Aletihad.
AIM for Scale Weather & AI-based Weather Forecasting, a project of which Jina is part of, is redefining how farmers access and use weather data. Traditional forecasts, reliant on expensive supercomputers, are mostly inaccessible to resource-constrained countries.
AIM for Scale leverages AI to create tailored, accurate forecasts that can be generated on standard laptops, democratising access to this critical information.
He explained that for years, potential solutions to agricultural challenges had stalled at the concept stage. However, the funding and strategic approach enabled by the UAE and the Gates Foundation have changed this narrative, Jina added, pointing to a new approach that prioritises results over barriers.
"It's not just about the money or the expertise, but the fresh attitude. Whether it's convening the right people, making targeted investments, or flying someone to talk to a government agency, the extent to which things we thought were impossible have been made possible is incredible," Jina explained.
Now that the project is well underway, Jina emphasised its transformative potential, highlighting how it tailors weather data to meet the specific needs of farmers.
"They need to know rainfall right when they're planting their main crop. Let's make the model accurate for that decision. Let's also make a forecast which is not just accurate for Europe, but also for farmers in Ethiopia or anywhere else," he explained.
By creating customised forecasts, the project ensures that farmers receive actionable information, reducing the risks of unpredictable weather that could otherwise devastate their crops and undo years of effort in a single day.
The focus now is on scaling these innovations further and refining them to provide even greater lead times and accuracy.
"We're investing on the research side, which is to increase what we call the lead time - how much in advance these forecasts can predict," Jina said.
With farmers increasingly benefitting from these tools, the project aims to reach more communities globally, helping them adapt to the challenges of a changing climate.
For Khuloud Odeh, Chief Digital Transformation Officer at CGIAR, the partnership between the UAE and the Gates Foundation offers an opportunity to rewrite the narrative of agricultural outreach, bridging the gap between scientific research and practical application.
"This partnership is significant because it's going to help us to really close these gaps quickly. CGIAR has been producing research for years and years, but we have to close the window of time needed between quality science delivered and how quickly we can put it in the hands of the people," she told Aletihad.
Odeh is a part of the AgriLLM project, aimed at transforming agricultural advisory services for farmers, particularly in climate-vulnerable regions, in partnership with the UAE's Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC) and the Falcon AI team.
The project focuses on adapting Falcon's lightweight, flexible AI model to agricultural science, creating a digital tool capable of offering accurate, science-based, real-time advisory services to farmers in low- and middle-income countries - an AI-powered agricultural chatbot.
The chatbot will be trained on decades of publicly available agricultural research from CGIAR and partner organisations such as FAO, the World Bank and the Gates Foundation.
The importance of AgriLLM cannot be overstated. In many developing countries, the ratio of agricultural extension workers to farmers is critically low - often one worker for thousands of farmers, Odeh explained.
This tool aims to empower these workers to assist far more people while directly supporting millions of farmers globally.
"Our goal, really, is to reach 500 million farmers - or even more - because this is just an indicative number. We hope that we don't leave any farmer behind, especially in remote and vulnerable climate areas," Odeh added.