The swamps of the Pantanal and the Chaco long made agriculture a virtual impossibility in these areas.
Humphrey: I've invested across a wide variety of early-stage technology companies targeting markets including education, retail, home services, consumer, mobile, analytics, communication, virtual and augmented reality, agriculture, transportation, trade, insurance, and more.
Uptake by policy makers has included: the Ecuadorian Ministry of Health rolling out pesticide poisoning surveillance modeled on our system; the Ecuadorian Association of Municipalities holding a national virtual forum on healthier agriculture; and the Ecuadorian Ministry of Agriculture promulgating restrictions on highly hazardous pesticides in June 2010.
It is the virtual library for nutrition, environment and agriculture.
Trade in virtual water can reduce consumptive water use in agriculture, as well as industry, provided that exporters achieve higher water productivity than importers.
Virtual water is one way to use less water on agriculture in a place where it is needed for other purposes.
Africa is reaching a point in which large-scale foreign and domestic investments in mining, agriculture, banking and information technologies will begin to promote a virtual circle of self-sustaining growth.
Plus, next month, with design firm IDEO, the foundation will fund a global innovation challenge--a virtual hackathon for working on ways to address climate change-related threats to agriculture and water systems.
In addition to the water-energy nexus, I also discuss the food-water nexus (agriculture consumes the most amount of water globally) and the concept of "virtual water," or imbedded water.
