Digital Public Infrastructure
Farmers around the world face increasing pressure. They struggle with unpredictable prices, climate change, and limited access to markets, finance, or advisory services. At the same time, new regulations such as the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) require companies to prove that products like coffee, cocoa, soy, or palm oil are not linked to deforestation.
Meeting these demands often means producing and sharing large amounts of data. But the digital tools available today are fragmented, expensive, and rarely designed with farmers in mind. Many smallholders end up paying high costs for proprietary systems, becoming dependent on buyers’ platforms, and losing control over their own data.
This fragmented digital landscape makes compliance difficult, reduces transparency, and creates inefficiencies across entire supply chains.
An Innovative Solution
Digital Public Infrastructure, or DPI, is a set of essential digital systems that facilitate secure and seamless interactions between people, businesses, and governments. Instead of each company or government building isolated solutions, DPI provides common building blocks – such as registries, open standards, and geospatial tools — that can be reused across different contexts.
DPI systems are:
- Publicly accessible: Designed to serve the common good
- Interoperable: Built on open standards so different systems can connect and operate seamlessly together
A useful analogy is transport. Just as people rely on public road networks instead of building their own private streets, DPI provides the “digital rails” that allow data, payments, and information to flow smoothly between people, businesses, and governments. This shared approach creates trust, lowers costs, and opens the door for innovation.
Think of DPI as digital train tracks or power lines:
They connect everything and ensure that information, payments, and data can flow freely.
DPI for Agriculture
In agriculture, DPI has the power to transform how data is used across supply chains. When farmer and field registries are combined with geo-localized climate and land-use information, they can support everything from better farm management and credit scoring to sustainability certification and traceability.
For smallholder farmers, DPI offers a pathway to fairer access. It reduces the burden of producing the same data repeatedly, ensures greater sovereignty over information, and makes compliance with new regulations more affordable. For companies and regulators, DPI increases efficiency, transparency, and reliability in complex global supply chains.
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More InformationWith DPI, agriculture can become more inclusive, efficient, and sustainable – ensuring smallholders and producer organizations are not left behind in the digital transformation of global supply chains.
SAFE’s Role in Building Agricultural DPI
Within the Sustainable Agricultural Supply Chains Initiative (SASI) and the Fund for the Promotion of Innovation in Agriculture (i4Ag), the SAFE project is working with the Digital Integration of Agricultural Supply Chains Alliance (DIASCA) to make DPI a reality. SAFE, as a Flagship project under the Team Europe Initiative on Deforestation Free Value Chains, focuses on practical solutions to help producers and companies comply with the EUDR.
Together with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Trade Center (ITC), the Technical Facility by the European Forest Institute (EFI), and DIASCA as partners, SAFE is promoting and piloting interoperable, open-source DPI tools that are modular, farmer-centered, and adaptable to different contexts. These tools are:
- Farmer-centered: designed to empower those producing at the source
- Modular: can be used individually or together
- Open-source: freely available and adaptable across contexts
DPI Tools to Support Zero-Deforestation Regulations and Goals
DPI Tool
Open Foris Ground
Description/Features
- Map-based farm data collection tool
- Designed for farmers and producer
organizations to capture georeferenced
data (i.e. polygons) - Works offline
- No prior technical knowledge needed
Zero-Deforestation Support Area
Captures on-the-ground
farm information as the first
step to monitor land use
GeoID
- Assigns unique 64-digit Geo-ID to
agricultural land parcels - Standardizes geospatial data
- Facilitates sharing of geo-data across
IT systems and stakeholders
Links collected data
to specific locations for
traceability and clear
deforestation checks
INATrace
- Traceability tool for agricultural
commodities - Tracks products from farm to final product
- Provides full supply chain transparency
Tracks products from
farm to market to ensure
deforestation-free sourcing
Whisp
- Deforestation-risk analysis tool
- Uses publicly available land cover maps and satellite datasets for a more nuanced and reliable view of land use
Monitors and flags potential
deforestation risks for
prevention and compliance
Open Foris Ground makes it simple for farmers and cooperatives to collect georeferenced data directly in the field, even offline through an Android app. Developed by FAO and Google, it offers a map-first interface that is easy to use without technical expertise.
GeoID creates unique digital identifiers (anonymous 64-digits Geo-IDs) for agricultural land parcels. Developed by AgStack, under the Linux Foundation, and hosted by FAO globally, this allows field data to be exchanged seamlessly across stakeholders and systems while keeping farmers’ information anonymous and secure.
INATrace is a traceability platform designed for agricultural commodities. Co-created with cooperatives and farmers, it enables transparency across entire supply chains, from the farm all the way to the consumer, and is already in use in multiple countries and sectors.
Deforestation Free Trade Gateway is an innovative platform designed to support all actors along global value chains to comply with deforestation regulations such as the EUDR. Developed by ITC, it is a gateway for managing and sharing data. It also brings together several open-source solutions for data collection, mapping and analyses to ensure that no actor is left behind.
Open Foris WHISP (What IS in that Plot?) helps track land-use change and deforestation risks. By combining several data sets, such as forest maps and other geospatial information, it produces reliable analyses that help farmers and cooperatives meet the requirements of deforestation-free regulations.
Each of these tools is free, open-source, and part of a growing ecosystem of solutions that place farmers at the center of digital transformation.
Digital Public Infrastructure is not just about technology — it is about creating inclusive, trusted, and sustainable systems that benefit everyone, including those in the agriculture sector. By reducing duplication, fostering interoperability, and ensuring data sovereignty, DPI has the potential to transform how global supply chains work.
For smallholders, it means better access to services, markets, and opportunities. For companies and regulators, it brings transparency, efficiency, and compliance. And for the planet, it offers a pathway to more sustainable and resilient food systems.
Publications
This video provides a generic overview of the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) and its implications for the cocoa sector. From 30 December 2024, operators placing cocoa and derived products on…
