Agricultural Engineering in Tropic and Transformation Countries About the role of digitalization in agriculture in selected countries from Eastern Europe and Middle Asia

Parallel to the collapse of the socialist economic system (late 1980s and early 1990s), the concept of “sustainable development” received increasing attention in the global context. With the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; [1]), the member states of the United Nations have agreed on global goals. According to the World Bank, the path of sustainable development is being massively accelerated by digitalization, including, and in particular, the transformations in the field of agriculture [2]. The FAO considers the SDGs to be achievable only by using digitalization [3]. Based on a description of the global trend towards digitization in agriculture, the current situation in Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan is characterized and a transnational thematic summary is carried out.