BAKU, Azerbaijan, Apr.2
By Sadraddin Aghjayev – Trend:
Azerbaijan’s Agriculture Ministry has done huge work for digitalization of agricultural processes in the country, Shahin Huseynli, a specialist in geographic information systems, remote sensing and sustainable land management at the Azerbaijani office of German Corporation for International Cooperation GmbH (GIZ), told Trend.
According to Huseynli, the creation of an electronic agricultural information system (EAIS) is a significant part of the work in this direction.
“According to the initial results of the ECOserve program’s implementation, within the framework of the program, work on improving the database of geographic information systems (GIS) is underway,” he said. “Improving the GIS database is a reference in carrying out activities on ‘smart’ and sustainable agriculture. As an example, the Ministry of Agriculture jointly with the German Space Agency, through the system, completed ‘Mapping scale and current state of meadow fields in Azerbaijan’ project in 2019.”
Moreover, we are currently working on the development of a GIS methodology called Analysis of Water Demand for Sustainable Agriculture in Azerbaijan, in which local and foreign experts are actively involved,” the specialist noted.
He also pointed out that within the ‘Application of adapted practices for sustainable, biodiversity-oriented management of natural resources in rural areas of the South Caucasus’ project, GIZ, together with the Ministry of Agriculture of Azerbaijan, is currently working on the implementation of good agricultural practices (Good Agricultural Practice - GAP) at a pilot site with an area of 100 hectares of the regional center of agricultural science and innovations, located in the Kurdamir district.
"Since agriculture in Azerbaijan is a top priority at the state level, it’s important to conduct smart and sustainable agricultural work. We can observe how the potential expands over time,” Huseynli said. The surveys and observations conducted by us both with the ministry representatives and with farmers within the ECOserve program show that interest in these areas is quite high. In this direction, we’ll be able to see a transition to sustainable agriculture in the near future, if the material-technical base is expanded and the process of training and awareness activities further accelerated," he concluded.
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