6. Digitalization in the EU Agricultural Sector: Seeking a European Policy Response

The agricultural sector plays a unique and strategic role in a country’s economic development, and thus in policymaking, not only because of its vitality as a food supply sector but also because of its interconnection and linkages with various activities in the food industries’ supply chain. As digitalization makes its way into the agri-food sector, new technologies provide the conditions for increasing agricultural output and efficiently dealing with some of the world’s most serious issues, such as population increase, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we will investigate the extent to which digitalization issues are integrated into related European Union (EU) policies, such as the Green Deal and the Farm to Fork Strategy under the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which will enter into force in 2023, using the Agricultural Innovation Systems (AIS) approach, given the agricultural sector’s unique characteristics. In other words, the paper intends to highlight specific parameters of the AIS, focusing on relevant initiatives undertaken by an involved actor of major special weight, namely the EU, for the purposes of digitalization of the agricultural sector.