Nicaragua Creates Innovative Agricultural Information System With Open Source

johanneswilm writes "Nicaragua is the second-poorest country of the Americas. It is now also the Latin American country with the most capable web-based information system for agriculture, thanks to open source software. ALBAstryde itself is open source, and it is based on Django and jQuery. It allows the user to play with the data, and its reach is further extended by a net of radio stations which are broadcasting the numbers to remote peasants, who thereby, for the first time ever, get up to date data on prices and general production levels in the country. The implementation for the ministry of agriculture of Nicaragua already contains live data."

Should be vry interestng to see how this works out

[KarmaOverDogma]

If small time farmers can prosper using this system in one of the poorer country in Latin America, this could bode very well for fair-trade types of practices and businesses, as well as micro-lenders, all over the world.

Good luck, amigos!

They wouldn't be so poor...

[Anonymous Coward]

...if they didn't intermittently keep electing the communist Sandinistas to wreck and loot their country.

Vaporware

[mi]

It is now also the Latin American country with the most capable web-based information system for agriculture [...] already contains live data.

Shut up and report back, when agricultural output in the country increases by, at least, 50%...

For benchmark, this source [nationsencyclopedia.com] reports: During 1990-2000 the agricultural output grew by a yearly average of 5.7%. In 2001, the agricultural trade surplus was $85.2 million. But that was when the Sandinistas were out of power [wikipedia.org]. They are ruling the country again since 2006, when Daniel Ortega returned to the presidency with 37.99% of the vote.

In 2007 they were afraid of a famine [highbeam.com] blaming a hurricane. Unless their policies [wikipedia.org] are drastically different now, they aren't going to achieve much good, even if they use Linux for their command-and-control implementation of economy — for the Greater Good (TM).

Hopefully it works out

[future assassin]

and show that giving poor countries technology so that their people can learn, grow and prosper will work out better then just throwing food and money at them just too keep their miserable, go nowhere lives going.

Give a man a fish he eats for a day, teach a man to fish he eats for a lifetime.

On the other hand it would be in best interest of big corporation that these poor countries don't move up and prosper as this kills cheap labor.

Re:Vaporware

[Xveers]

But would you expect ANY sort of technological improvement like this to boost output by 50%? Such infrastructure improvements can take years to properly pay off dividends, so we may be waiting for some time before we get real results. That of course will be attributed to other inputs (either because cause/effect cannot be determined, or because it serves a political master better to have something else as the cause).

Re:Vaporware

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up and report back, when agricultural output in the country increases by, at least, 50%...

To an individual farmer, if they can double their price by selling where there is a shortage then they have effectively doubled their crop. This is better market information, the politics of those who paid for the development is irrelevant. Software works according to maths, not politics.

Re:Obligatory...

[mi]

Seems that if you are the elected leader of a Central or South American country, you'd better not do anything Socialist

Unless the country is Honduras, in which case, we'll defend you against your own country's Congress and Supreme Court...

we will kill you and install a brutal military dictator who will slaughter your people for generations to come.

Citations needed