Author: Tomaso Ceccarelli

Publish date: 30 October 2025

The 2025 World Food Forum (WFF) flagship event was held from 10 to 17 October at the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) headquarters in Rome. I was pleased to contribute to the session “Discover the Future of Agrifood Systems with ATIO KB”. ATIO stands for “Agrifood System Technologies and Innovations Outlook,” and its Knowledge Base (KB). As Digital Agri Hub, we contribute to the ATIO KB by curating valuable information on digital solutions and providers across LMICs. I therefore illustrated the mutual benefits we see in this collaboration and future prospects.

The 2025 World Food Forum and the Science and Innovation Forum

The WFF can be seen as a global platform bringing together stakeholders, serving as a space for fostering inclusive partnerships, turning ideas into actions and scaling solutions toward the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals. This year also marks the FAO’s 80th anniversary.

It is organised around three pillars: Global Youth Action, Science and Innovation Forum (SIF), and the Hand-in-Hand Initiative Investment Forum. This year, the SIF emphasised the critical role of science, innovation, and partnerships in shaping a more resilient and equitable food future.

ATIO KB as a means to discover the future of agrifood systems

I was pleased to join and contribute to the SIF session, dedicated to ATIO KB. This is a platform and catalogue of agrifood-systems innovations developed across a full spectrum of technologies and use cases, including grassroots innovations. The ambition is to achieve a global coverage through a federated system and a collaborative approach that includes as many subjects as possible who are able to provide this valuable information.  It also includes different data discovery modalities (including AI-assisted) and search based on complex filters and semantics.  

The session, organised by ATIO KB coordinators, part of the FAO Office of Innovation (OIN), asked core partners (funding organisations, providers of data and information, technological partners, end users such as farmer organisations) to explain their role and the value they see in ATIO KB. Indeed, this seemed to work as the discussion was concrete and forward-looking, and it clarified how a federated and collaborative system can avoid duplication while raising data quality.

The ATIO KB and Digital Agri Hub

My own connection to ATIO KB began when Valeria Pesce, one of the main driving forces behind this project, together with Fabrizio Bresciani and Deegii Chuluunbaatar and, of course, the whole team, reached out to say that our Hub’s repository was already being extracted and entered into ATIO KB via our API (application programming interface).  FAO not only acknowledged our contribution but invited us to formalise this collaboration.     

At that moment, I realised that this is exactly what we want the Hub's data repository to become: part of a body of knowledge that is considered a public good. These are building blocks that will help it grow with our hard work as curators, particularly necessary given the dynamic nature of the information it contains: we are all aware of how quickly digital solutions and their providers can change.

Looking ahead

Looking ahead, our role is to keep updating and enriching this shared global catalogue with special attention to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and small-scale producers in the context of the federated system that ATIO KB plans to develop.

It's a wonderful aspiration but also a responsibility, if we consider, for example, how many AI-based solutions are being developed today, which will possibly draw on repositories like ATIO KB and Digital Agri Hub. The power of AI-assisted tools to generate recommendations at any scale, from small-scale farmers to policy makers, is enormous and... just around the corner.

But data trust, legitimacy, and reciprocity are still very much open questions on which we cannot afford to make mistakes, and for which ATIO KB, precisely because of its data curation and governance model, will, I'm sure, be able to keep its promises.  If we keep the data open, validated, and accountable, then the convening power we saw in Rome can translate into everyday decisions that actually improve food systems.

Tomaso Ceccarelli sharing insights on the connection between ATIO and the Hub’s repository. (Picture credit: FAO)