By Abdul Bari Kareem, Co-founder and CTO, T57

Traditional food supply chains operate like a game of telephone played across continents. A mango travels through 7-12 intermediaries from an Indian orchard to a London supermarket, each adding markup while documentation grows increasingly detached from reality. Distributors typically add 10-30% markups to cover storage and transportation costs, while retailers add another 20-50% before products reach shelves. Temperature logs get falsified. Origin certificates are duplicated. Quality certifications become meaningless stamps on aging paper.

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By Afzal Hussain Mohammed Nakheeb, Founder, Chairman & Head of Strategy, T57

Malaysia's agricultural sector enters 2026 under the combined pressures of food security ambitions, climate risk, and tightening sustainability standards in global agricultural trade. These challenges—ranging from rice self-sufficiency gaps and climate-induced yield volatility to EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) compliance requirements and digital transformation imperatives—demand integrated, technology-enabled solutions that no single traditional platform can adequately address.T57 is uniquely positioned to meet this moment, offering the only comprehensive suite of tools perfectly aligned with Malaysia's emerging 2026 agricultural landscape.
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By Afzal Hussain Mohammed Nakheeb, Founder, Chairman & Head of Strategy, T57

The Middle East agricultural sector stands at the edge of a structural transformation in 2026, driven by the imperative to reduce chronic food import dependency, the acceleration of climate-smart technology adoption, and fundamental shifts in agricultural trade and supply chain traceability. The region needs to work on this transformation because, as the World Economic Forum reported in early 2025 ...

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By Abdul Bari Kareem, Co-founder and CTO, T57

Agriculture is no longer “catching up” with technology; it is quietly becoming an AI-native, automation-first industry where software, sensing, and robotics define competitiveness as much as soil and seeds do. The result is not just smarter farms, but a re-architected food system where data flows are advancing the industry toward autonomy.

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By Afzal Mohammed Nakheeb, Founder, Chairman & Head of Strategy, T57

When the February 2026 India-US Interim Trade Agreement was signed, New Delhi sold the reciprocal 18% tariff rate as a calibrated opening; Washington branded it a “historic trade deal.” The tariff saga did not end there. On February 20, 2026, a US Supreme Court’s decision struck down President Trump’s sweeping emergency-tariff architecture. But this has not ended tariff pressure for India - it has simply shifted the battlefield from headline tariff announcements to narrower, more legally durable instruments and bilateral arrangements.

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By Afzal Hussain Mohammed Nakheeb, Founder, Chairman & Head of Strategy, T57

For too many farmers across the global South, harvesting a good crop does not translate into getting paid on time—or sometimes getting paid at all. Payment delays, opaque deductions, and disputes over quality routinely erode already thin margins. Farmers, as a community, lack bargaining power. And that makes me ask a question with an uncomfortable answer: “Are today’s agri payment systems fit for purpose?”

The answer is, “No.”

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By Abdul Bari Kareem, Co-founder and CTO, T57

On January 26, 2026, I sat in the audience at Gulfood listening to our Founder, Chairman, and Head of Strategy, Afzal Hussain Mohammed Nakheeb, speak on the panel “Break-Through Technologies and AI-Powered Automations: Strategic Value Creators for an Intelligent Food System.” He was joined by Shail Khiyara, CEO of Swarm, Marc Oshima, CEO of Oshima Good Food, and Dr. Grace S. Thomson, Director of the AI Policy Clinics at the Center for AI & Digital Policy (CAIDP). Hearing them on that stage in Dubai, with the global food industry all around us, crystallized for me what we at T57 must focus our energies on.

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By Afzal Hussain Mohammed Nakheeb, Founder, Chairman & Head of Strategy, T57

“Don't attempt to scale AI; attempt to scale your decision first and pick that high-stakes decision. AI gives you a gift and a choice. The gift is that of time, and the choice is: what are we going to do with it?” I felt that Shail Khiyara’s words captured the tone for our Gulfood 2026 panel discussion on “Break-Through Technologies and AI-Powered Automations: Strategic Value Creators for an Intelligent Food System.” His words stayed with me long after he spoke

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By Afzal Hussain Mohammed Nakheeb, Founder, Chairman & Head of Strategy, T57

As 2026 dawns, the Indian agricultural sector stands at a critical inflection point where policy ambition converges with the hard realities of climate risk and global market volatility. For industry experts and policymakers worldwide, India is no longer just a participant in the global food system but a primary driver of its demand dynamics and digital transformation. We believe five pivotal developments will redefine the landscape for agricultural trade, agri-commodity trading, and food security in the coming year.
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By Afzal Hussain Mohammed Nakheeb, Founder, Chairman & Head of Strategy, T57

Agriculture has always been close to my heart, and it is also the heartbeat of any thriving economy's identity. When I look at agri-dependent regions, I do not see statistics or supply chains first; I see farmers, family businesses, and entire communities whose livelihoods rise and fall with the harvest. That is why the recent signing of the Memorandum of Understanding between T57 and MAIB (part of the International Assembly of Islamic Business) is significant to me: it is a commitment to putting farmers and agri-entrepreneurs at the center of a new, technology-enabled growth story.

Why does agriculture matter so much?
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By Afzal Hussain Mohammed Nakheeb, Founder, Chairman & Head of Strategy, T57

In agricultural markets, trust isn't just a nicety. It is currency. Yet outdated payment systems routinely trap millions of farmers in cycles of financial uncertainty. When substantial transactions vanish into bureaucratic black holes for weeks, the real cost isn't measured in delayed interest—it's calculated in the broken livelihoods of farming communities.

Even sophisticated financial corridors struggle with these inefficiencies. A recent inter-company transfer between my Dubai and Saudi operations took three weeks to clear—a stark reminder that if large businesses face such delays, imagine the devastation for cash-strapped farmers operating on razor-thin margins.

What is the impact of delayed payments on farmers?
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By Afzal Hussain Mohammed Nakheeb, Founder, Chairman & Head of Strategy, T57

Across global trade, a $2.5 trillion financing gap locks out countless businesses from participating in commerce. The agriculture sector is among the hardest hit. Farmers, cooperatives, processors, and agri-SMEs struggle to secure the working capital they need to buy inputs, pay labor, move goods, and fulfil export contracts, even as the world produces enough food to feed everyone. The result is a paradox: food is grown, but often never reaches the people who need it most.​

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By Afzal Hussain Mohammed Nakheeb, Founder, Chairman & Head of Strategy, T57

In the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and beyond, as many as 40% of farmers continue to use hand tools and face immense challenges against middlemen networks that have dominated trade for over a hundred years¹. The outcome is grim: farmers in countries such as India, Egypt, and Nigeria earn barely enough to subsist. Equally disturbing is that end consumers are left paying exorbitant prices. The system’s design leads to untold stress in the farming community, often resulting in farmer suicides and perpetuating poverty^{2 3}. This crisis is so pervasive that words fail to convey its depth. For a majority of the estimated 624 million farmers worldwide^4, the unyielding uncertainty inflicted by the traditional agricultural and trade system turns life's simplest hopes—to provide, to endure, to dream—into distant possibilities. To me and a handful of close associates, this didn’t look like mere poverty; it was a painful and relentless erosion of dignity and possibility. The world cannot look away from such heartbreak. We could not, especially in an age when technology can create solutions to this unforgiving system.

Is technology the real answer?

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