At Euroseeds 2023, held this year in St Julian’s, Malta, Csaba Gaspar, Program Manager of the OECD Seed Schemes, spoke with Seed World Europe Editorial Director Marcel Bruins about the OECD Digitalisation project currently underway.
Gaspar said there are four primary drivers of the project:
First, the global pandemic underlined the importance of a digitalized system to business continuity. The second driver OECD considered was cost savings and efficiency improvements. Third: a digitized system allows a more robust certification and labelling system, reducing fraud. Finally, OECD looked forward, hoping that digitization might spark innovation in the future.
The OECD hopes to have a basic system in place by the end of 2024, to which they will add functionalities.
Gaspar expects the project to impact seed companies positively on multiple fronts including the general speed of transactions and opportunities to reduce fraud.
In addition, he says, “We are planning to open up this digital system to authorized seed companies in the future. It’s not happening at the beginning, but it will come later. So then they can directly … add information and provide information to the farmers on a seed lot. For example, they can attach or upload the phyto certificate or the digital certificate. Then the buyer can look for this data through the OECD system. And also, if the company multiplies seed, they can validate the seed lot through the OECD system. So, it will be immediate possibilities through a digital OECD system.”
In the one-on-one chat, Gaspar also outlined several of the other key topics that he is working on within the OECD Seed Schemes, and in which ways the plant breeding and seed companies can have an influence in the work of the OECD Seed Schemes.
