“Human Health in Market Systems” – Hari Devarapalli

Hari Devarapalli:
Good morning everyone? We have already gone through the … Fillip has told us a triple bottom-line and we need to really put the together. Interestingly if you look at cybernetics, it’s actually starts with a purpose, purpose of a system. We see that there are two different industries. One is agriculture, the other one is the medical science. Both have a single purpose, the purpose is to keep the human healthy. Do you all agree? That on one side we are trying to create the demand from the humans to supply the food and our further off modern medicine has told us food is diversion. Therefore, whether it is actually working are the market systems are allowing us to really trace that from end to end. That is, from the production to the consumption, and then make sure that we are having the healthy food that is coming from a healthy farm, and if not, we could switch to a different farm.

Therefore it is interest, what I’m trying to basically tell you is if you look at the agriculture sector and the healthcare sector, that in two different worlds, they’re in silos, there is no proper integration. On top of it, we can also see that is not complete interaction. If you see there is a connection between agricultural scientists and a farmer of course, they create seeds, GM, whatever, and then farmers are using those things and then it goes to distributors and retailers and then comes to the kitchens. Is there direct connection from across all these, each of those two connections? That’s [inaudible 00:02:01] we are actually lost in the market system, and we have the final reaching and then finally if you are sick you go to the medical doctor.

After that, what happens? There’s a big healthy diet, and we have a dietitian, nutrition, and all these people are going to tell you is take the healthy diet, go to market, and if you look at the variety of the food that agricultural industry is going to create, if you take just mangoes, there are 15 hundred varieties, but do we really know what do we need to keep our health good. There’s no really way of doing as of today. What we actually see is if you look at the natural system, if you look at, they’re all cycles. Whereas the market systems that we are creating chains, there’s a sublime chain, therefore we don’t really know where it starts and where it ends. It doesn’t really close the loop. Also, natural systems have a kind of a continuous loop where everything is consoled. Therefore they have a water cycle, a nitrogen cycle, these are all cycles where we rarely, where natural systems doesn’t create [inaudible 00:03:17]. That we don’t know what to do with it.

Just to skip this because of the time intervention. If you look at the cybernetic principles of telemoney, that is a purpose, here we see agriculture and healthy healthcare have the same purpose. Intervention we tried to provide vitamins and nutrients through the food that we actually create, and healthcare is trying to remedy our cure of disease that we got. Feedback systems are as we see, it’s all broken, and every time we try to do some intervention, it is actually becoming more and more problematic rather than fixing the problem. Variety. Variety of agriculture is there, variety of needs are there for various different diet requirements, but we rarely know how to match it. Therefore variety matching, feedback loop, these are the concepts that I have used and tried to create a using ICT.

Probably this was not at all an easy thing to do before this information and communication technology, and now, it’s a possibility we can actually create the complete loop that is from the farmer to the diner, and diner back to the agricultural scientist, we would be able to connect these things in a systematic way. This is what [inaudible 00:04:37], is one of our flagship product, our platform, that is a mobile based farmer advisory system, which helps farmer to take the appropriate inputs using the soil conditions, the weather climatic conditions, and advise the farmers to grow properly. We also have the traceability right from the farm cluster to the diner, to the kitchen. Also, we have another system called M-Held, that is mobile based held system where we take the diagnostics off the patients and then feed them to the doctors, and then there’s a cycle there itself where the farmer can advice the patient to a proper [inaudible 00:05:21].

What I am trying to do now are in a kind of a progress is to fix this, the feedback loop. Therefore, what we can see these are all can be addressed if we can complete the loop, and this is how we can actually benefit to the offer other aspects of people, planet, and profit. Therefore, what I feel is, because of the technology that is available today, we should be able to create cycles not the chains in our market systems so we know exactly what we are doing, and how we can benefit this society as a whole. Thank you.