Digital innovations offer opportunities to design policies that will bridge information gaps, reduce monitoring transaction costs, and facilitate collaboration amongst different stakeholders. This is particularly important for agri-environmental policies, which is seeking to move from practices to results-based incentives. Yet increased digital tool usage creates its own challenges and risks.

Evidence from an OECD work highlights that policy administrators are already using digital technologies and data to improve the way they deliver agri-environmental policies. Yet, further opportunities to improve current policies or enable new ones, are evident. First, governments have the opportunity to design and implement more “data-driven” policies and to evaluate policy performance more robustly. Second, governments can use digital technologies to re-think monitoring and compliance, reducing compliance burden 

for producers and the administering costs. Finally, digital technologies can also enable new approaches which reward farmers going “beyond compliance” to achieve more ambitious environmental results.

The digital transformation is creating new opportunities for information, value creation, and trade, all of which will shape the transformation of agriculture and food systems. Digital technologies can facilitate farmers’ participation in new markets created in response to new consumer demands as well as facilitate exchanges between actors in global value chains. They can potentially decrease trade and transaction costs, streamline negotiations, improve the efficiency of both cross-border product delivery and custom management, ease compliance with SPS standards, and contribute to risk assessments.