Novel index on the propensity for digital transformation in agriculture (PADiTIndex)

Abstract Digital agriculture is one of the levers that will enable food systems to adapt and remain resilient in the face of climate change. However, in addition to being generally slow to take off, its adoption is not geographically uniform. While studies at the producer level have investigated the rationale for this disparity, we argue that it could be that different countries and markets are prepared to absorb digital technologies into their value chains. This study assesses the propensity of different countries and markets to digitally transform their agriculture using a new proposed index named Propensity for Agricultural Digital Transformation Index (PADiTIndex) . It uses four indicators including the economic weight of agriculture in the country’s economy, the vulnerability/resilience of the country’s agricultural sector to climate change, the country’s agricultural productivity, and its openness to innovation. To this end, time series data for these four indicators were collected from FAOSTAT, ND- GAIN, USDA and WDCR for the period 2015–2022, making the assessment scalable. A few cases of missing data were completed by interpolation while normalization was used to transform the four indicators that were in different units into a single comparable format. The results indicate that the value of agricultural production per agricultural worker, the resilience of food systems to climate change, and national openness to innovation are the country-level dimensions most closely associated with the propensity of economies to digitally transform their agriculture. In this regard, the Netherlands, Israel, Belgium, Denmark, and Luxembourg stand out as the top five countries where the digital transformation of agriculture is most evident. Conversely, the five countries with the lowest rankings are in Africa (Niger, Madagascar, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, and Guinea), suggesting room for improvement, beginning with fostering a stronger commitment to modernizing their agricultural sectors to enhance their resilience. This work also corroborates findings from studies, highlighting the well-documented importance of socioeconomic factors in climate change adaptation planning.