CropWatch: more than 160 countries join China’s tech war against the West on food
- A Chinese agricultural monitoring system is arming developing countries with information so they can better manage market fluctuations
- Previously, many countries had to rely on US and EU monitoring, but their reports did not allow access to the original data
CropWatch was first developed in 1998 by a team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Originally intended for domestic use, it has now become a global initiative that is gaining popularity in many countries around the world.
Most countries had relied on two major remote agricultural monitoring systems run by the United States and the European Union to predict the rises and falls of food prices in the global market.
The development of CropWatch enabled China to “avoid being deceived by foreign forecast information in market decisions,” the academy said in a mission statement dated in 2012.
Now recent efforts by the CropWatch team have sought to transfer the technology to developing nations.
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