How to achieve sustainable agrifood industry?

Are Competitive Intelligence and Sector Analysis necessary to create sustainability in the agriculture and the food industry? This is the one of the main questions for us! I know that sustainable food and agriculture is a crucial parameter for the world in which food is nutritious and accessible for everyone and natural resources are managed in a way that maintains and protects ecosystem functions to support current as well as future human needs. There are many key factors to assess sustainability in the agri-food industry.

Organic Apple Production by applying Good Agricultural Practices in Erzincan. Cooperation with Government, SMEs and Farmers.

When I have managed some agrifood industry projects in Turkey, we have analyzed the competitors, trends, new products, customer needs, technological changes, marketing strategies, regulations, risks, policies, prices and skills in the domestic and global markets. We have also performed current, medium and long-term sector analysis to understand the survival capability of the sector. So that we designed, developed and implemented an innovation action plan to create provincial agri-food growth strategy document.

Digital transformation and using it in agribusiness to increase productivity and quality.

Now, let’s discuss two of the key factors to achieve sustainability in Agrifood industry.

I see that many organizations don’t perform competitive intelligence and sector analyses today. Normally agri-food industry must do this to solve the economic, social, and environmental challenges that affect them all.

Let’s explain! Competitive intelligence is the capability that captures and analyses consumer, market, trends and competitive information in a systematic and continuous process, with the focus on generating actionable insights to help the business make truly valuable decisions regarding future events to achieve a transient competitive advantage to the organization.

Regular survival analysis will show the future of the sector and this will help them to make healthy disengagements before business failure.

I like this quote of Peter F. Drucker, “Knowledge has become the key economic resource and the dominant, if not the only, source of competitive advantage."

For example, a global survey conducted by PWC shows that companies that place a high value on competitive intelligence grew at a 20 percent faster than other companies. Clearly, I have to say that an extra 20 percent growth is really valuable in today's complex business world.

I have to say that agri-food organizations should have a constant fast-paced change in today’s digital age and get better position faster than others and create a long and prosperous future on a global scale. They have to do competitive intelligence and sector analysis to capture, analyze, and package the opportunities into actionable insights in agriculture and food industry.

Agricultural drones are used in farming. Sensors and digital imaging capabilities improves crop yields and farm efficiency.

Therefore, when we manage a development project as agrifood consultant, we design, develop and implement three-year innovation action plan to foster quality, productivity, market access, growth and competitiveness for creating welfare for the stakeholders, SMEs, the private sector and farmers.