Covid-19 crisis shows fragility of food supply system

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Richard Tiffin, chief scientific officer and founder of Reading-based agricultural data firm Agrimetrics, says the Covid-19 public health crisis is revealing the fragility of the global food system. Tiffin is director of the Centre for Food Security at Reading University, as well as being a founder of Agrimetrics, which was originally funded by Innovate-UK under the government’s Agritech strategy in 2017. That disconnect could be resolved with a connected data ecosystem that would show where problems are likely to be in the food system and take action to correct the course.” And, for sure, we have all seen the supermarket shelves denuded of dry pasta in recent weeks. Agrimetrics has built a graph database using GraphDB, dubbed a “Data Marketplace”, which contains global food system information, and which is intended to be used by companies specialising in artificial intelligence (AI) and application development, and focused on agriculture as an industry. Tiffin says it has designed a “Natural Capital Explorer” tool to enable decision-makers to balance out various competing demands on the natural environment from food production, flood prevention, and so on.

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