Digital revolution in agriculture jeopardising farmers, food sustainability: Report

The involvement of the Big Tech Giants in farming will pose a risk to farmers and food sustainability, warns a report from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES, Food).

According to the report, major technology companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba are utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) in ways that deeply influence food production, which results in farmers being over, indebted, dependent, and exposed to climate risks.

IPES, Food is a global think tank that sets the agenda and helps pave the way for sustainable food systems worldwide. It carries out research into political economy, nutrition, climate change, ecology, agronomy, agroecology, and economics, as well as being politically active.

The publication "Head In The Cloud" demonstrates how the tech giants command the financing and policy space while they get a massive amount of public money and at the same time, they tear down the initiatives that would give the farmers more control over their means of production and sustainability.

The study shows that industrial agriculture is progressively being designed around data- driven precision tools that are the results of collaborations between Big Tech and Big Agro. Such capital intensive models typically need large upfront investments, thus, the financial risks of the farmers are increased, and the smaller scale producers are marginalized.

Furthermore, the report indicates that this data, heavy systems use great amounts of energy, minerals, and water resources, confine agriculture to high input monocultures, and thus raise the impact of climate hazards.

Big Tech companies are leveraging AI and cloud based systems to guide crop and input decisions. In reality, this implies that the farming decisions are largely influenced by proprietary algorithms which are not transparent and accountable, thus, the farmers are being deprived of their knowledge and decision making autonomy.

At the same time, the companies are gathering data from farms to increase their profits, thus the farmers are losing control and ownership of their own information.

Consequently, only a few tech companies are becoming extraordinarily powerful in dictating the way food is being and will be produced, states the report.

The report calls for a just, resilient, and sustainable food system to deal with the challenges of climate change and global instability.

According to experts from IPES, Food, the path to a fair and sustainable food system involves changing the ones who control innovation, the ones who benefit from it, and also rethinking what we call innovation initially.