# Food System Digitalization as a Means to Promote Food and Nutrition Security in the Barents Region
## 4 Transforming the Food System through Digitalization to Promote Food and Nutrition Security
especially for the northern delivery dependent territories [66]; the higher cost of products, due to transportation costs, result in an imbalance in the structure of food consumption by the population [67]. Strengthening horizontal interaction within the region will reduce these problems due to more effective use of local opportunities for food supply amongst the population. Digitalization, in a broad sense, covers the sphere of interpersonal communications, which will provide a more efficient exchange of information at all levels--from state to personal. This will create the right conditions and lead to the emergence of alternative channels for providing the population of the region with better access to food, including the crowd principle basis, which uses the resources of the population itself. An example of the realization of this potential at the interpersonal level is of a number of groups in the \"VKontakte\" social network, which provide the ordering and delivery of products from Scandinavian countries to the cities of northwest Russia [68]. Such means are especially important within the human security perspective, since they provide a more efficient personal satisfaction at individual levels, including specific requirements for food. The opportunities provided by food system digitalization can be considered in terms of what is currently available and what will be available in the future, such as the Internet of food (IOF) mentioned earlier. These opportunities will create new possibilities to monitor a regional food system to inform more contemporary and adequate decisions for a better secure regional food system. Digitalization results in the widespread use of ICT that generates and accumulates huge amounts of data that opens the way to obtain distinct raw data, in addition to official statistics, to characterize the peculiar aspects of the food system at the regional level. For example, in Russia, official statistics mostly focus on supporting the tasks of the federal level administration, while the tasks and instruments of the regional administration are essentially different (customs tariffs, compensation fees, excises, sales taxes, quotas, etc.). These statistical records are mainly economic indicators to characterize food security amongst the population as a whole at the federal level. However, specific indicators that focus on local and regional levels are missing. Such an approach makes the Russian food security monitoring system state security focused rather than being human security focused at local and regional levels. For instance, the peculiar requirements for the diet of indigenous people from the northern regions based on cultural preferences are not accounted for in the monitoring system. Therefore, additional data is necessary for effective monitoring of the food system of the Barents region taking into account its peculiarities, since \"food security is not only about reliable access to nutritious food. It is also linked to climate change, wildlife management, pollution, economic vulnerability and cultural security\" [69]. Digitalization provides access to data that concerns several actors in the food system, including persons and households. Beneficial information can be gathered from this data through text analysis in general and opinion-, knowledge- or data-mining technologies, as well as demand analysis and personalization techniques. An important task that provides a technological basis for creating information technologies to support food security is the formation and maintenance of a knowledge base (KB) that characterizes the overlapping structure of a digitalized food system. Ideally, such a base should describe all components of the food system and their relations to provide the possibility of automated reasoning aimed at supporting decision making in food security and risk management. The creation of a KB is a key task for the potential use of blockchains, the IOF, and other technologies. The KB provides the necessary common conceptual basis for any intelligent distributed system.