The Messenger - Immersion #12: Dignified Income for Farmers
If you're a regular TV watcher, you know that shows are often divided into seasons. When we started this series on Immersion, we were thinking about such a season even if we hadn't programmed the entire season at the beginning.
That's about to change. We are going to take a break and come back in a few weeks with a fully programmed season with episodes and other events plotted and planned beforehand.
This last Immersion episode takes us back to the real world, where we worked with a citizens' jury who deliberated on a dignified future for farmers.
A jury is a form of real world immersion. Jurors hear representation from experts and other witnesses and deliberate on outcomes. In a few years such deliberations might happen in the metaverse but for now its got to be done in the real world.
Twenty Jury members were identified through an intensive process of selection. The Jury comprised of farmers from across the country that was chosen to capture the diversity in agro-climatic zones, landholding sizes, crops cultivated, gender and market exposure (procurement, market, traders).
TLDR (in the jury's own words); As you know, farmers have a lot of problems. Today our country is suffering from malnutrition - lack of protein, vitamins and micronutrients. The whole world is seeing the effects of climate change and is not able to cope with it. The community of farmers suffers the most from these problems. However, only farmers can provide solutions to the problems of the country.
The nation’s farmers are ready to take on this responsibility.
Farmers will change and the country will change.
Some of the recommendations from the farmer's jury about the future of farming and farmers.
Farmers and governments need to innovate to adapt to climate change.
Farmers should be given carbon credits for agroforestry and other carbon-friendly farming practices.
On technology and marketing, the government needs to increase training, research and infrastructure.
In addition, farmers need subsidies on machines and the subsidy process needs to be simplified and improved.
They also had the following recommendations for their fellow farmer-citizens:
Their recommendations to the government and private actors in graphic form:
You might still be wondering what a jury of farmers has to do with technologies of immersion. Take a step back and ask yourself: what is a court and what is a trial and what is a verdict? Isn't that a way for a group of people to immerse themselves in the details of an issue, get the big picture along with the details and then form a considered opinion? How does it matter if that happens in VR or physical reality?
Bye for now! We will be back in a few weeks with the next avatar of this newsletter.