From Innovation to Impact: Why Digital Agriculture in ASEAN Is a Delivery Challenge

Authors: Grow Asia and Erika Balzarelli (Founder, The Sustainable Smallholder)

Digital innovation is now firmly embedded in ASEAN’s food security, climate resilience, and economic development agendas. The ASEAN Leaders’ Declaration on the Vision for Food, Agriculture and Forestry Towards 2045 and the ASEAN Food, Agriculture and Forestry Sectoral Plan (FAF-SP) 2026–2030 articulate six strategic thrusts, within which digital innovation—and critically, its delivery— are positioned as key enablers of a food-secure, climate-resilient, equitable, and sustainable food system.

Across the region, governments, businesses, and development partners are investing in digital tools to improve productivity, strengthen market access, enhance traceability, and build resilience to climate and price shocks. Mobile advisory services, digital finance, e-commerce platforms, precision agriculture tools, and data-driven decision support are no longer experimental concepts, they are widely available and increasingly sophisticated.

Yet despite this growing pipeline of innovation, digital agriculture adoption across ASEAN remains uneven, fragmented, and often confined to pilots. Many solutions demonstrate promise at pilot level, but struggle to achieve sustained uptake or scale.

This paradox raises a critical question: if the tools exist, why does adoption and impact remain limited?

As GrowAsia prepares its upcoming Digital Landscape Report 2026, this article is the first in a mini-series intended to bring partners and stakeholders into the thinking process behind the report. Rather than presenting conclusions at the end of the journey, Grow Asia aims to share emerging insights shaping the analysis. At the heart of this work lies a simple but powerful proposition:

digital agriculture in ASEAN does not suffer from a lack of technology. It suffers from a delivery problem.

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An outdated assumption holding the sector back

A persistent and outdated assumption underpins many global digital agriculture initiatives today: if the technology is good enough, smallholder farmer adoption will follow. When uptake is slow, the response is often to build better apps, add more features, or further optimize the innovation.

This assumption overlooks a critical reality. Between digital tools and farmers lies what GrowAsia refers to as the “delivery bridge”: the mechanism through which value is translated, trusted, and made usable. When this bridge is weak or poorly designed to fit the ground realities and smallholder farmer constraints, smallholder adoption remains uneven, fragmented, and unscaled, regardless of how advanced the technology itself may be.

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Constraints operate at different levels

Evidence from across the region and early findings from ongoing research in Vietnam and the Philippines show that adoption constraints operate at multiple levels of the system. Treating them as a single, undifferentiated problem obscures where action is actually needed.

At the farmer level, constraints are rooted in smallholder farmers’ social, cognitive, and economic realities. Trust is central: farmers consistently value peer validation, local leaders, and known advisors over anonymous digital recommendations. Digital literacy and confidence vary widely, particularly among older or more marginalized farmers, increasing cognitive burden and fear of making costly mistakes. Risk exposure, driven by volatile incomes season on season, climate uncertainty, and debt, further discourages experimentation, even when potential benefits are clear.

These constraints are social, cognitive, and economic realities, and they differ significantly across smallholder segments. They primarily cannot be solved for by more or better technology.

At the delivery-system level, constraints relate to how solutions actually reach farmers. Even when tools are nominally free, the true cost of adoption includes (elements such as but not limited to) access to smartphones, data plans, internet connectivity, time, learning effort, and switching costs. Equally important is the presence, and capacity, of intermediaries such as extension services, cooperatives, lead farmers, and agri-SMEs to act as effective delivery agents.

When effective delivery agents are absent, under-resourced, or lack aligned incentives, the delivery bridge between innovation and farmer use weakens. Crucially, delivery systems also need to be tailored to different farmer segments. A digitally fluent 30-year-old farmer in the Philippines requires a very different delivery approach from an older, risk-averse farmer operating at subsistence level.

This is where many digital initiatives falter: delivery systems are not designed nor tailored, to match the different farmer realities.

At the wider ecosystem and governance level, constraints shape what delivery systems can realistically do. Fragmented policy frameworks, overlapping mandates, short-term project funding, weak data interoperability, and limited coordination undermine scale. While these issues may appear distant from farmers, their effects are powerful: they weaken intermediary capacity, discourage long-term private-sector investment in delivery models, and perpetuate pilot-driven approaches.

Most importantly, these three layers interact and must be aligned. Farmer trust cannot be built if intermediaries are weak. Intermediaries cannot scale if policy and financing remain fragmented. And sustained adoption is unlikely if private sector actors and financial institutions are unable or unwilling to invest in delivery models over the long term.

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Reframing the challenge: from more innovation to a tailored delivery bridge

Taken together, these insights point to a necessary reframing. The central question is not “How do we get farmers to use digital tools by further optimizing innovation?” but

“How do we build delivery mechanisms tailored to different smallholder farmers in ways that align with their realities?” 

The delivery bridge is not a constraint in itself; it is an interface. Its role is to mediate between farmer-level realities, delivery-system capacity, and broader ecosystem ambitions. Effective delivery mechanisms do not eliminate trust, literacy, or risk constraints - they absorb them, work around them, and translate value through human and institutional relationships.

This reframing has profound implications for policy, public and private investment, and partnership strategies. It shifts attention away from ever-greater investment in digital tools alone, towards investment in intermediaries, aligned delivery incentives, and public–private–philanthropic partnerships that require active orchestration.

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What’s next

This article marks the starting point of GrowAsia’s insights. In the coming weeks, we will share further reflections on differentiated delivery pathways, the evolving role of the delivery bridge and the practical implications for governments, businesses, and development partners seeking to scale digital agriculture responsibly.

By opening this conversation early, we aim to keep stakeholders engaged in the process, aiming for a shared understanding of what it will take to move from innovation to impact as one coordinated system.

Digital agriculture in ASEAN has no shortage of ideas. The challenge now is building delivery bridges strong enough to carry innovation all the way to sustained smallholder impact.