Improving Agricultural Information and Knowledge Transfer in Cambodia - Adopting Chinese Experience in Using Mobile Inte
Agriculture is a knowledge intensive sector. Information and knowledge plays an essential role in helping farmers to improve productivity and sustainability through promoting and adopting the most effective and relevant innovations and technologies. With
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Foreign Economic Cooperation Centre, Ministry of Agriculture, Beijing, China [email protected], [email protected] Business and Information Systems Research Centre, University of Bedfordshire, Luton, UK [email protected]
Abstract. Agriculture is a knowledge intensive sector. Information and knowl‐ edge plays an essential role in helping farmers to improve productivity and sustainability through promoting and adopting the most effective and relevant innovations and technologies. With rapid development and advances in agricul‐ tural science and technology, traditional agriculture practices have been trans‐ formed to knowledge based and digital agriculture production. This paper reports a project that aims to improve the agricultural information and knowledge flow in Cambodia by adopting China’s success in using Mobile Internet Technologies. The paper provides a brief review of China’s current achievements in using ICTs to accelerate information and knowledge flow in Agriculture and Cambodia’s current status in using ICT for agriculture information disseminations. An empir‐ ical investigation was carried out in Cambodia to gain more insights into the farmers information needs and their intention to adopt Mobile Internet based information dissemination services. Based on the empirical study, Chinese expe‐ rience in using Mobile App was introduced and a mobile App called AgriApp was designed and tailored to meet the Cambodia’s needs and conditions. This AgriApp was initially tested and valuable feedback was collected for improve‐ ment and better deployment in Cambodia.
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Introduction
The agriculture sector in Cambodia is the most important source of income. Cambodia’s economy is still highly dependent on agriculture, which contributes close to one-third of national GDP and employs more than half of the total labour force (Yu and Diao 2011). However, as a result of the rapidly changing socio-economic conditions since 1990, Cambodia agriculture sector faces many new challenges such as high population growth, embracing a market economy, nationwide food security and decreasing agri‐ cultural production conditions. These challenges are exacerbated by the limited access to agricultural knowledge and information in the rural areas. There are limited knowl‐ edge bases and appropriate approaches for information and knowledge transfer. As a © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing AG 2016. All Rights Reserved D. Li and Z. Li (Eds.): CCTA 2015, Part II, IFIP AICT 479, pp. 357–368, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-48354-2_36
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result, the latest agricultural technology and market information cannot reach farmers in a timely manner. At the same time, farmers’ problems and inquires cannot be addressed directly and timely. Therefore, it is imperative to improve Cambodia’s agri‐ cultural productivity and economic situation of farmers through better information dissemination service. Over the last three decades, China has been very s
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