Digital technologies can help markets function better and improve farmers’ access to them. Technologies can also be leveraged to address multiple market failures and facilitate smallholder farmers’ integration in markets and value chains. Digital technologies can promote international trade and effectively improve market‐based institutional arrangements for contributing to all three dimensions of sustainability. At the same time digital technologies can be profoundly transformative, they can also entail challenges and risks that would require policymakers to act.  

Digital technologies have the potential to harness, accelerate, and scale up innovative methods of enormous positive impact on food and agriculture. However, as agriculture becomes data-driven, the use of digital technology, such as Big Data and applications of Artificial Intelligence, may have a significant impact on farm management and markets. In the long term, digital technologies could also affect farm structures and agricultural labour, bringing about both economic and social change in the sector.