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Food Industries have to cater a plethora of consumers having variety of tastes. For sustaining in such environment companies create their unique selling point and big data helps them to analyze market situation for such purpose. In this book chapter, the supply chain of fruits and vegetables and the post-harvest losses encountered at each stage in absence of data analytics is discussed. This can be an opportunity for the food industries to reduce food loss and gain better returns on investment by going for a digital transformation. Companies combine big data with technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence to get faster and more personalized experiences. This chapter includes comparative case studies of food and retail sector for better understanding of the outcome.

From the perspective of any nation, rural areas generally present a comparable set of problems, such as a lack of proper healthcare, education, living conditions, wages and market opportunities. Some nations have created and developed the concept of smart villages during the previous few decades, which effectively addresses these issues. The landscape of traditional agriculture has been radically altered by digital agriculture, which has also had a positive economic impact on farmers and those who live in rural regions by ensuring an increase in agricultural production. We explored current issues in rural areas, and the consequences of smart village applications, and then illustrate our concept of smart village from recent examples of how emerging digital agriculture trends contribute to improving agricultural production in this chapter.

The global incidence of dengue has grown dramatically in recent decades. According to WHO, 3.9 billion people are at risk of infection with dengue viruses with 70% of the actual burden is in Asia. In Pakistan, Punjab faced the major dengue outbreak with 21,685 confirmed cases and 350 deaths, mainly due to DENV-2. Dengue is a major health care problem that affecting countries worldwide. Dengue epidemic have a devastating impact on health care systems. All four characteristics of VUCA are true of the challenges we face due to the dengue epidemic. That called for a need to have integrated disease and surveillance (IDSR) framework for the management, prevention, and control of dengue. The IDSR framework for dengue includes hospital readiness, patient reporting system, surveillance, evidence-based decision making, awareness, citizen engagement, and availability of insecticides along with third party validation on top of it to keep a close check on containment efforts. A comprehensive patient portal was developed for all public and private health care facilities to report dengue cases i.e. suspected, probable, and confirmed as per the Dengue GCP guidelines. For surveillance, smartphone-based application was developed for field users to report larvicidal activities i.e. indoor residual spray in real-time, case response, and hotspots (areas at risk). As per established Standard Operating Procedures, hotspot regime was setup to sweep out breeding spots or larvae population at regular intervals in a week. For the purpose of evaluation and monitoring, third party validation application is designed to check activities that are performed as per prescribed standards or not. Dashboards and reports are available for various stakeholders to facilitate evidence-based decision making. These reports analyze field-based activities and rank performance of district and town. System also generates alerts i.e. Breteau (the number of positive containers per 100 houses inspected) and Container (percentage of water-holding containers infested with larvae or pupae) Indices, in real-time, enabling the administration to take decisions in a timely manner. Looking at the magnitude of dengue-related morbidity and mortality, all departments were involved in dengue prevention and control activities. This approach has proven effective in curtailing this mosquito-borne disease. The impact of these interventions can be clearly seen in regard to confirmed patient and death reported in recent year.

This study contributes to the understanding of the health effects of pesticides exposure and of how pesticides have been and should be regulated.

This study presents literature reviews for the period 2000–2013 on (i) the health effects of pesticides and on (ii) preference valuation of health risks related to pesticides, as well as a discussion of the role of benefit-cost analysis applied to pesticide regulatory measures.

This study indicates that the health literature has focused on individuals with direct exposure to pesticides, i.e. farmers, while the literature on preference valuation has focused on those with indirect exposure, i.e. consumers. The discussion highlights the need to clarify the rationale for regulating pesticides, the role of risk perceptions in benefit-cost analysis, and the importance of inter-disciplinary research in this area.

This study relates findings of different disciplines (health, economics, public policy) regarding pesticides, and identifies gaps for future research.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming increasingly popular in agribusiness to help increase food production capacity for the ever-expanding global population. This chapter provides a holistic overview of the latest trends around the applications of IoT in agriculture. We begin by giving an overview of IoT and its capabilities, followed by a deep dive into the practical and realistic aspects of leveraging IoT into the agroecosystem. IoT is already being used for many intelligent agriculture applications, such as open-field agriculture, controlled environment agriculture (greenhouse), livestock breeding, agricultural machinery, and more. This chapter examines those applications and ventures beyond the farm into several other aspects of the ecosystem, including storage, warehouse ambiance control, agri-data analytics and decision control, logistics, environmental safety, etc. The contents of the chapter would be based on extensive studies and empirical analysis of the latest research papers on this subject from around the globe, accurately interpreted and transformed by the authors in light of their academic background and professional experience in the digital transformation arena.

Purpose: Consumer acceptance is considered the most important factor in functional food success and is given top priority in new product development. This study focussed on finding factors that influence consumer perceptions about active food and the pattern of active food consumption. This chapter aims to provide a deeper understanding of taste trading based on a consumer decision-making framework.

Research Methodology: Cross-sectional consumer data were collected by floating G-Doc containing the questionnaire which was supposed to be answered by people according to their behaviours, preferences, knowledge regarding functional foods etc. It contained questions about their income, gender, preference towards functional foods, factors affecting decision-making while purchasing functional foods etc.

Results of the Study: The findings suggest that the consumers' attitude towards functional foods was mainly influenced by the quality and suitability of the product. Purchase intent was found based on age, literacy of population, income and health benefits of active foods. Awareness of functional foods and their price significantly affected the purchase of functional foods. Most people were willing to spend more on functional foods in the future regardless of the taste and provided high quality and product suitability.