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try to use data privacy as a sword against transparency. And silo the conversations - keep the environmental justice and privacy groups separate - so can't push on what's actually a privacy issue and what's an excuse.

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connections between challenges of environmental justice and tech justice - massive power of a few companies, keeping things opaque/information symmetry to try to undermine activism and change.

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From Samir Doshi: My focus was going to be on one of the first fights of environmental justice, the impact of industrial agriculture and pesticides on farmworker communities and worker justice. We're seeing a massive amount of investment and activity of digitalization in agriculture, and most of it is for exploitation under the narrative of 'growing enough food to feed the hungry while also not impacting the environment.' There is also the sub-narrative that there are not enough workers to employ in the fields. All of this ignores the existing labor issues for farm, factory, retail and food service workers, who were made visible in the pandemic but then went back to being invisible because of labor, environmental, immigration, and technology regulatory environment that continues to allow for exploitation.

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From Samir Doshi: My focus was going to be on one of the first fights of environmental justice, the impact of industrial agriculture and pesticides on farmworker communities and worker justice. We're seeing a massive amount of investment and activity of digitalization in agriculture, and most of it is for exploitation under the narrative of 'growing enough food to feed the hungry while also not impacting the environment.' There is also the sub-narrative that there are not enough workers to employ in the fields. All of this ignores the existing labor issues for farm, factory, retail and food service workers, who were made visible in the pandemic but then went back to being invisible because of labor, environmental, immigration, and technology regulatory environment that continues to allow for exploitation.

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Platform for Real Food - HEAL Food Alliance

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Food is our most intimate and powerful connection to each other, to our cultures, and to the earth, and to transform our food system is to take one giant step towards healing our bodies, our economy, and our environment.

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Data for Black Lives is a movement of activists, organizers, and mathematicians committed to the mission of using data science to create concrete and measurable change in the lives of Black people.

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Samir Doshi: For rural communities, the latest tech narrative is broadband expansion, which should be a right but ends up in the form of Digital Redlining. 

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Samir Doshi: For rural communities, the latest tech narrative is broadband expansion, which should be a right but ends up in the form of Digital Redlining. 

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JUST RELEASED- AT&T’s Digital Redlining: Leaving Communities Behind for Profit - National Digital Inclusion Alliance

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a unified voice for digital inclusion program and policy

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The world's biggest technology companies and distribution platforms, such as Microsoft and Amazon, have started entering the food sector. What does this mean for small farmers and local food systems?

It leads to a strong and powerful integration between the companies that supply products to farmers (pesticides, tractors, drones, etc) and those that control the flow of data and have access to food consumers.

On the input side, agribusiness are joining the trend of getting farmers to use their mobile phone apps to supply them with data, on the basis that they can give 'advice' to the farmers.

On the output side, big e-platform corporations can be seen buying their way into the sector and taking control of food distribution.

Together, they favour the use of chemical inputs and costly machinery, as well as the production of commodities for corporate buyers not local markets. They encourage centralisation, concentration and uniformity, and are prone to abusing their power and monopolisation.

A few years ago, the Japanese tech company Fujitsu erected a pilot, vertical farm on a parcel of land outside of Hanoi. The high-tech farm, which looks more like a factory, produces lettuce on stacked shelves in a completely enclosed high-tech greenhouse managed by central computers in Japan. The computers are connected to a cloud that Fujitsu operates in partnership with one of Japan's largest food retailers, Aeon. The farm is at once impressive and confounding-- such an enormous amount of resources and energy going into the production of a few trays of low-value lettuce.

The unlikely economics of vertical farming has not diminished its appeal in Silicon Valley. Since 2014, vertical farm start-ups have raked in US$1.8 billion from tech investors like of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Japan's SoftBank. This is an amount larger than all annual foreign direct investment flows into agriculture. Yet, despite the huge cash inflows, the high-tech farms these companies have built only occupy the equivalent of a measly 30 hectares of land worldwide. Hardly a game changer for global food production.

Just down the road from its vertical farm on the outskirts of Hanoi, Fujitsu is piloting another farm that offers a different and more realistic vision for how technology companies are moving into agriculture. This farm is located on an ordinary, outdoor field, indistinguishable from neighbouring farms. The only significant difference is that all workers on the Fujitsu farm carry smartphones supplied by the company and their movements are being monitored. The hours they work, their productivity, and the inputs they apply are carefully logged and registered in Japan on the company's cloud. Fujitsu is deploying the latest in digital technology to the age-old corporate imperative of maximising labour exploitation.

It is critical that we look beyond the hype. Yes, digital technologies can be made to work for farmers, consumers, farm workers and the environment. But technology does not develop in a bubble; it is shaped by money and power-- both of which are extremely concentrated in the tech sector. In an era where only a few corporations hold unprecedented control over data, communications and the food system, digital agriculture will evolve in ways that reinforce their power and profits- unless we organise to actively prevent this from happening.

In the digital tech world, power is based on data-- the capacity to collect and process massive amounts of it. So, just as with other sectors of the economy, large corporations-- be they tech companies, telecoms providers, retail chains, food companies, agribusinesses, or banks-- are racing to collect as much data as they can from all nodes of the food system, and to find ways to profit from this data. These efforts are getting more and more integrated and connected, through corporate partnerships, mergers and take-overs, creating the possibilities for a much more profound and complete corporate capture of the food system.

By far, the biggest players in this mix are the global technology companies, known as Big Tech. Table 1 lists some of their moves into the food sector. They are new to agriculture but are beginning to invest heavily in it, especially into digital information platforms connected to their cloud services.

Microsoft, for instance, is building up a digital farming platform called Azure FarmBeats that operates through the company's massive, global cloud technology, Azure. The platform is being designed to provide farmers with real-time data and analysis on the condition of their soils and water, the growth of their crops, the situation with pests and diseases and the looming weather and climatic changes they may face. The value of this information and advice depends on the volume and quality of data that Microsoft can harvest and analyse with algorithms. This is why Microsoft is partnering with leading companies developing farm drones and sensory devices, as well as with those companies developing technologies that can receive and act upon the information transmitted from FarmBeats; the high-tech tractors, pesticide-spraying drones and other machines hooked up to the Azure cloud.

Agribusiness companies, especially those that sell seeds, pesticides and fertilisers, have a head start on Big Tech. The biggest agribusiness players all have apps, now covering millions of hectares of farms, that get farmers to supply them data in exchange for advice and discounts on the application of their products ( see box: Agribusiness goes digital). Bayer, the world's largest pesticide and seed company, says its app is already being used on farms covering over 24 million hectares in the US, Canada, Brazil, Europe and Argentina.

Bayer, like the other agribusiness companies, has to lease the digital infrastructure it needs to run its app from one of the Big Tech companies that control the world's cloud services. In this case, it is Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's largest cloud service platform, ahead of Microsoft, Google and Alibaba. Amazon, like Microsoft, is developing its own digital agriculture platform, which can potentially tap into the data collected by Bayer and numerous other companies that use its cloud services. It thus has a huge advantage over these companies, not only in terms of the amount of data it can access, but also in terms of its capacity to analyse this data and ultimately profit from it. The logic then, which we are already starting to see play out, is towards an integration between the companies that supply products to farmers (pesticides, tractors, drones, etc) and those that control the flow of data.

Agribusiness goes digital

The last few years have seen an explosion of mobile apps being offered to farmers by pesticide and fertiliser companies to 'help' them take decisions on what to plant, how much to spray, when to harvest, amongst other things.

When Monsanto bought up the Climate Corporation back in 2013 for almost one billion dollars, many scratched their head. Why would an agrochemical corporation buy up a company that sells weather insurance to farmers? Part of the answer is in "Climate FieldView", a series of mobile phone apps that the company was working on to get farmers to submit data about their fields in return for advice on what and when to plant. Monsanto claimed then that "data science" could be a $20 billion revenue opportunity beyond its core business of seeds and chemicals.

Fieldview is now functional, though mostly in the US. Meanwhile, Monsanto was taken over by Bayer, integrating even more "data science". The strategy to get farmers to submit data in return for 'advice' seems to be interesting for any company that aims to sell chemical inputs to farmers. The way the system works is basically as follows:

You open a Fieldview account online and upload historical field data (normally provided by a service company in your area) and all kind of other data (such as info on planting, spraying, seeds used, etc.).

Then you install the "cab-app" on your tractor, a small tracking device that captures data on all kinds of things the tractor does on the field, and uploads the data to the company's Fieldview drive in the cloud. From now on, Bayer has access to all farming data that the you capture and upload (seed density, fertiliser and chemical use, etc.).

Bayer will then overlay your info with its data sets on soil quality, pests and disease, weather, humidity, etc., and recommend what you should buy from them to deal with any problems - all on your app.

You can link your Fieldview account with Bayer's "PLUS Rewards" and get discounts and services linked to any chemicals they can get you to buy, including their flagship herbicide "Roundup".

Disclaimer: this only works with maize and soybeans

Bayer is just one of the companies that aim to get direct access to their customers fields to sell their products. BASF offers their Xarvio app to do the same. Their "scout" helps you identify weeds, diseases, insects, etc. in your field and predicts when they will become a problem. The "field manager" will tell you when to spray and fertilise, how much, and- if you want it (and for an extra fee)- the "healthy fields" app offers you to "leave the planning, implementing and documenting of crop protection activities to us." BASF then sends the sprayers to your fields when they decide it's needed.

In 2019, Syngenta bought Cropio, adding Eastern Europe's leading digital agricultural company to its rapidly expanding CropWise digital platform. Syngenta boasted that, with the acquisition of Cropbio, it was "the only agricultural company to have access to leading management platforms in the top four agriculture markets: in the United States with Land.db, Brazil with Strider, China with the Modern Agricultural Platform and now Eastern Europe with Cropio. When combined, more than 40 million hectares globally will be managed using a Syngenta digital tool, with plans for this to double by the end of 2020."

Not to stay behind, Yara - the largest fertilizer company in the world, offers a whole set of digital tools to assess your fertiliser needs such as Yaralrix which transforms your phone into a nitrogen analyser. Another is Atfarm, which allows you to analyse your fields with satellite images and selectively apply fertilizer. And of course, once you know what you need, Yara is on hand to sell you the product.

All of this may sound quite disconnected from the realities and needs of the 500 million or so small farm households in the world who produce much of the world's food. High-tech applications, like driverless tractors and pesticide spraying drones, are clearly not being developed for them. More importantly, the quality of the information that digital platforms provide to farmers is only as good as the data collected. So, for farms in areas where there is a lot of data collection (regular soil tests, field studies, yield measurements, etc) and for farms that can afford new technologies that collect data (like new tractors, drones, and field sensors), tech companies can collect large volumes of high-quality, real-time data. They have been developing algorithms to process and analyse the data and claim they can provide these farmers with advice on fertiliser application, pesticide use, and harvest times that are fairly specific and useful to their farms. Nevertheless, it also makes a huge difference if the farms in the area are doing monocropping, because this makes it vastly more simple for data collection and analysis, as well as for recommendations.

Small farms, however, tend to be located in areas where there are minimal to no extension services and hardly any central collection of field data. These services have been gutted across the Global South through decades of structural adjustment. Nor can small farms afford the high-priced data gathering technologies that bigger farms can use to feed information to the cloud. As a result, the data that tech companies collect on small farms will inevitably be of very poor quality.

Tech companies and the governments promoting digital agriculture are not working to address this lack of field data on small farms. While money, especially public money, is going into the infrastructure connecting rural people to mobile and internet networks, including the new race to 5G, no new money is going into state agriculture extension services. If anything, the input suppliers- that currently provide some minimal extension to farmers that purchase their products- are looking to digital agriculture to cut back on their presence in the field. The plan is instead to work around this information gap, to use satellite data and whatever hodgepodge of field data can be collected from the private and public agronomists, NGOs and food companies that still visit farmers.

The advice small farmers will get from such digital networks, via text messages on their cell phones, will be far from revolutionary. And, if these farmers are practicing agroecology and mixed cropping, any advice they receive will be completely useless. But good advice to farmers is not really the end game here anyway. For the corporations investing in digital agriculture, the objective is to integrate millions of small farmers into a vast, centrally controlled digital network. Once integrated, they are heavily encouraged- if not obligated- to buy their products (inputs, machinery, and financial services) and to supply them with agricultural commodities that they can then sell onwards.

Over the past two decades, Microsoft's owner, Bill Gates, has sunk a huge part of his fortune into trying to get small farmers in the Global South to adopt what they claim to be "the most highly advanced seeds, pesticides and fertilisers", sold and developed by the world's largest agribusiness corporations. Despite having invested millions, if not billions, into the international research centres promoting these technologies and programmes like the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), his efforts have had little impact, and adoption rates for the technologies remain low.

Gates is banking that digital agriculture can turn things around. In September 2020, Microsoft and AGRA formalised a partnership to help Microsoft expand its Azure FarmBeats platform across the continent and deepen their joint efforts to deploy Microsoft's "chatbot" app Kuzabot. This app provides small farmers with advice via WhatsApp and SMS, including information on what inputs to use and which companies to buy from. Microsoft had an earlier partnership with the Gates-funded International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in India with a similar app that provided farmers advice on when to sow their seeds, and was rolled out through the agricultural extension services of the Government of the State of Karnataka.

At the same time, Microsoft's FarmBeats is integrating the US-based start-up Climate Edge into its platform. Climate Edge describes itself as "a big data broker for the developing agriculture sector". Essentially, it aggregates data on small farmers supplied by agricultural consultants, NGOs, companies, and researchers that use its platform and then sells this information onwards to insurance companies, certification bodies, pesticide dealers, large food companies like Unilever and even NGOs who want to prove their projects have boosted yields.

Microsoft and its partners are not alone in developing digital data and communications platforms that they can then sell to pesticide companies and other actors who want to influence farmer choices. The leading provider of "chatbot" advisory services to small farmers in Kenya, Arifu, has the multinational seeds and pesticides company Syngenta as a partner. Arifu says its digital platform "creates a feedback loop by generating a demand for Syngenta seeds ... Through Arifu, they can reach a population for which they would have otherwise needed costly and scarce ground ambassadors." But costs savings for input companies like Syngenta are just the tip of the iceberg of the profits that can be made for those who control the growing digital agriculture space.

Arifu is now part of a larger digital platform in Kenya called Digifarm, operated by Vodafone's Kenyan subsidiary Safaricom. Digifarm provides millions of small farmers in Kenya with chatbot services like Arifu, sells them inputs and crop insurance, offers them loans and buys and sells their produce, all via Safaricom's national digital money platform, M-PESA. For this, Safaricom charges a fee on all transactions (see box: Banking on rural communities).

Digifarm, and similar platforms in other parts of the world, are being hailed for providing financial services to rural people who would not otherwise be able to access them (so called "banking the un-bankable"). But this obscures what is really happening. These platforms are not making the knowledge of small farmers or their diverse seed and animal varieties "bankable". To become bankable, farmers must conform to the system-- they must buy the inputs that are promoted and sold on credit (at high interest rates), follow the "advice" of the chatbot to qualify for crop insurance (which they must pay for), sell their crops to the company (at a non-negotiable price), and receive payments on a digital money app (for which there is a fee). Any missteps can affect a farmer's credit worthiness and access to finance and markets. It's contract farming on a mass scale.

"I...followed all the training lessons," said Wilson Kibet, a 50-year old Kenyan farmer who took a loan from Digifarm at 15% interest to buy a package of hybrid maize seeds and chemical inputs and who followed the advice provided. "They even told us not to plant beans in the middle of maize rows."

Banking on rural communities

In November 2020, Brazil launched a nation-wide digital platform for payments and instant transfers, called Pix. With the new application installed on their mobile phones, Brazilians can now make payments and money transfers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without the need for a bank account. Today, an estimated 60 million Brazilians, or 35% of the population, do not have a bank account because they cannot afford bank fees, lack a fixed address or the required personal documents, or live in isolated rural communities too far from bank branches. But many of these people have mobile phones, and can access Pix.

The situation is similar elsewhere. According to the World Bank, there are 1.7 billion people without bank accounts around the world, of whom 1.1 billion have mobile phones. There is thus a huge potential financial market that tech companies, known as fintechs, can tap into, displacing the traditional giants of the financial system.

China alone has roughly 224 million people without bank accounts and the nation's two tech giants, Alibaba and Tencent, have been aggressively moving ahead with plans to integrate their dominant e-commerce platforms, digital payment apps and micro-lending divisions-- which, for a fee, broker micro loans with banks based on the shopping data compiled on individual consumers. The potential profit is immense, and explains why Alibaba's micro-lending arm, Ant, raised a record smashing US$3 trillion in bids on its initial public offering (IPO) in October 2020, the largest IPO in history. Concerns about how such concentrated power and loose oversight with credit could harm the larger economy pushed the Chinese government to bring forward new antitrust rules on fintech, leading Ant to withdraw its IPO at the last minute.

Monopoly control is not the only concern. Digital money creates new possibilities for theft, fraud and indebtedness, leaving those with little experience with banking and finance especially vulnerable. It also creates the potential for more state surveillance and control, as is the case in China, where projects are being developed to integrate digital money platforms with state efforts to control people's behaviour. And farmers should question what it means when a company like Alibaba, with its growing control over people's shopping habits, is partnering with the largest industrial farming companies to develop artificial intelligence for their factory pig farms.

Another supposed benefit for farmers from these emerging digital platforms is that they eliminate dependence on "middlemen". True, farmers are finding creative ways to use digital platforms to sell directly to consumers, especially during the current COVID-19 virus pandemic, and there is also plenty of potential for farmers to use digital technology to strengthen their negotiating power, especially if they do so through cooperatives or other collective structures. But, even in such positive cases, people still need to do the "middle" work of collecting, distributing and selling the foods produced on the farm, and in much of the world, that work is still done by millions of small scale traders and vendors, most of whom are women, selling food in nearby towns.

It would be great if digital platforms could be designed to help these two poles-- farmers and small vendors- to better communicate and coordinate food chains and to eliminate the greedy corporations and cartels that often sit in between. This, however, is not in the interests of the corporations rolling out today's digital agriculture platforms. They will use their digital platforms to increase their pricing power over farmers (see box: Beware farmers: Singapore is watching!) and to bring labourers in the extended "middle" of the food system under the control of their invisible command centres. This is akin to what Uber has done with taxis, or what Rappi and iFood have done with online grocery and restaurant deliveries in Latin America. In particular, women traders and vendors of the food system will be rendered to piece workers for the Big Tech companies, as well as consumers of their financial products, paying fees for digital money transactions and interest on micro-credit loans.

Consider Twiga Foods, one of several agri-tech start-up companies seed-funded by Microsoft's 4Afrika programme. It was founded by a US academic who, while studying Nairobi's wholesale markets, became convinced of the potential for connecting farmers directly to small vendors, bypassing the powerful cartels. Backed by the World Bank, Microsoft and some other venture capital, Twiga Foods built up a fleet of trucks to source foods from farmers outside of Nairobi, to then be delivered directly to a network of small vendors in the city. All of the transactions are organised through cell phones, payments included, and are run on Microsoft's digital platform and Azure's cloud services.

Twiga's early success caught the attention of larger companies, looking for a way to finally break into Africa's growing consumer market. Goldman Sachs and the French family that owns the Auchan supermarkets took major stakes in the company. Twiga partnered with IBM, another top cloud services provider, to pilot a digital banking scheme with its vendors. And, most recently, Twiga formed a partnership with Kenya's top e-commerce retailer meaning that Twiga is now selling foods directly to consumers; cutting out the small vendors it was initially established to serve. Twiga also says it plans to "leverage" Auchan's rapidly growing supermarket network to expand into West Africa.

Twiga may have created some efficiencies in Kenya's food distribution system, but those savings are not being passed on to farmers and vendors. Twiga's more significant impact is that is has refashioned food distribution, using pretty much the same work force, to enable corporations to insert themselves in the middle and extract wealth.

The path that corporations are steering digital agriculture and food distribution down dovetails with larger retail developments. The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating a shift towards online retail sales for food that Big Tech companies like Alibaba and Amazon have been aggressively pushing for ( see box: How Big Tech and artificial intelligence control our shopping). As these companies try to assert themselves in countries where food retail is still largely in the hands of small vendor networks and traders and/or state regulated wholesale systems, they are heavily promoting digital platforms as a preferable marketing option for farmers, while concealing their own monopolistic ambitions.

In India, for instance, where a hard fought battle has been raging for years to keep big retail chains out of the country, corporations are now colonising the retail space through e-commerce. Walmart entered into India in 2016 by a US$3.3 billion take-over of the online retail start-up Jet.com which, in 2018, was followed by a US$16 billion take-over of India's largest online retail platform Flipkart. Amazon is not far behind. Today, Walmart and Amazon now control almost two thirds of India's digital retail sector.

The corporate expansion of online retail in India is a direct threat to millions of hawkers, small traders and retailers, kirana stores, and mom & pop shops. Amazon and Walmart are using predatory pricing, deep discounts and other unfair business practices to lure customers towards their online platforms. When the two companies generated sales of over US$3 billion in just six days during a Diwali festival sales blitz, India's small retailers called out in desperation for a boycott of online shopping.

But more corporations are coming to get a piece of India's growing digital retail market. In 2020 Facebook and the US-based private equity giant KKR committed over US$7 billion to Reliance Jio, the digital store of one of India's biggest retail stores. Customers will soon be able to shop at Reliance Jio through Facebook's chat application, WhatsApp.

Although online shopping has not taken off in Latin America as in some other regions, its current growth is tremendous. It is driven by the expansion of mobile phone delivery apps such as "Rappi" which offers a whole range of services, from food to pharmacy and from banking to books, to just mention a few. The company has witnessed an extraordinary growth in Latin America, duplicating its size every four or five months, and spreading to nine countries in the region in the last five years only. Its slogan is "We run for you", and it is now valued at US$3.5 billion. According to Luis Techera of Rappi Mexico, their strategic value lies in the information they collect about the shopping behaviour of their customers: "If for example Gillette wants to launch a new shaving machine, they can ask Rappi to approach 100,000 people that bought a Gilette razor in the past, are between 27 and 35 years old and live in a certain area".

Beware farmers: Singapore is watching!

In 2014, Singapore-based Olam, the world's third largest cocoa processor, launched what it calls the Olam Farmer Information System (OFIS) in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. Olam says its "technology allows field staff to survey and record, on the spot, thousands of farms, the surrounding landscape, as well as the farmer's social circumstances."

" Data - including farm size, location, age of (tree) stock, economic, social and health infrastructure, and eco-support systems - is collected at farm-gate level on a hand-held device by Olam's trained field staff ... Olam field staff brief the farmers on how the data will potentially be used and assure them that any personal data would be available only to Olam staff and selected Olam customers under an appropriate Terms of Usage agreement and otherwise in strict confidence. After the briefing, the farmer either consents to provide relevant information or opts out from the exercise. The OFIS database is owned by Olam International Limited in Singapore and all personal data-related processes and protocols are in accordance with Singapore laws or practice. GPS is widely used to geotag farmers' locations, plotting farms and mapping key social infrastructure points in the villages. The data from this mapping and the farmer surveys are fed via an Android OS application into Olam's database and then visualized via an online maps interface and analysis graphing tool to generate reports."

Olam says it uses this data to help farmers maximise their productivity and avoid deforestation. It casually omits any mention of how it might use this intelligence gathering to push down prices and maximise its profits.

Small farmers in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire are in a long-standing war with Olam and the other big traders over cocoa prices. The power asymmetry is such that these cocoa farmers earn a measly US$1.31 per day, well below the UN's US$1.90 definition of extreme poverty, with a quarter of that coming from non-cocoa sources. In October 2019, the governments of Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire took some action towards improving the situation by requiring the companies to pay a US$400-a-tonne "living income differential" to help increase payments to farmers (a step-down from their effort to set a minimum floor price, which was rejected by the companies). But, now, Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire say the big traders are already undermining the programme, including Olam. They say Olam, the world's third largest cocoa processor, is deliberately reducing its purchases of beans from Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire to sabotage the "living income differential" programme.

How big tech and artificial intelligence control our shopping

Increasingly, the big food distribution platforms are using artificial intelligence (AI) software to predict our food preferences and get us to buy more.

Retail consultant Daniel Burke, of Blick Rothenberg, calls this "the holy grail... to build up a profile of customers and suggest a product before they realise it is what they wanted".

In Germany, a Berlin start-up called SO1 is doing similar things with its AI system for retailers. It claims that nine times more people buy AI-suggested goods than those offered by traditional promotions, even when the discounts are 30% less.

Online giant Amazon is no stranger to data collection. It has vast amounts of information on its customers from their online purchases and via its products such as its interactive Echo Dot speakers, which you can request to do things for you. It is now making a move into physical retailing, with bricks-and-mortar shops packed full of AI-aided computer vision technology. It means that, in its Amazon Go grocery stores currently up and running at 27 locations in the US, people can shop with no interaction with a human or a till. They simply swipe their smartphones on the scanner when they enter the supermarket, pick up what they want to buy, and then just walk out. The AI is watching of course and sends you a bill at the end.

When in 2017 Amazon bought up Whole Food Markets, a major organic food grocery network with over 400 shops across the US, it sent shivers through the sector. Amazon wants you to buy online but doesn't care whether you want to get your food brought to your home or pick it up from the shop; they can do both now. Undoubtedly, soon they'll be nudging you with what to buy, based on your preferences that they have stored in their giant databases.

More than three-quarters of large retailers around the world either have AI systems now in place, or plan to install them shortly, according to the research group Gartner. Its analyst Sandeep Unni says the global pandemic has accelerated this trend because it has dramatically changed consumer habits.

This might all sound nice and convenient for the customers who are into this, but for the corporations it's even better as people tend to buy more as a response to personalised nudging. Also, serious concerns arise for when personalised profiling linked to e-shopping goes mainstream. Who controls the massive amount of data being collected, who owns it, and what is being done with it? "The customer experience is fast becoming the new currency", claims Gartner. So your preferences could already be up for sale somewhere to the highest bidder. What if the profiling of people is based on race, social economic status, or sexuality? And what happens to the small food stores and local markets that can't afford to dive into artificial intelligence?

Farmers, both small and large, are already using new digital technologies. As the advertisements go "there are multiple ways that these technologies could be harnessed to make food systems better for everyone. Who could be against farmers learning more about the fertility of their soils and the health of their crops with an app on their phone? Or services that provide a more direct connection to the markets and consumers to sell produce to?" The problem is, who controls the data and who gives the advice? This is on top of important questions about how secure these evolving systems are for users and how they might facilitate corporate collusion, tax evasion and other crimes. Apart from these issues, we also need to address the impact of the digital technologies themselves, and how they affect local farmers knowledge and practices.

There are quite a number of initiatives that aim to break with the dependence on high-tech and corporate controlled digital services that are now being pushed upon farmers. One is "FarmHack", a worldwide community of farmers that build and modify their tools and share information around this freely on-line. Some new IT companies are driving a shift towards crowd-sourced, non-proprietary exchanges of information and research, not only within local communities but with small producers and processors facing similar conditions around the world, for example on pest control techniques.

Over the past decade, numerous farmer-to-farmer networks have sprouted up across the world to share information and advice, many of them using digital tools to communicate. A recent example of how farmers used digital tools to get their products to consumers was when the COVID-19 crisis led to official food distribution channels to be cut off. In many places around the world, farmers went online through social media or e-commerce tools to organise alternative markets. In Karnataka, India, farmers started using Twitter to post videos of their produce and connect with buyers. Others resuscitated traditional systems of bartering, to overcome their lack of cash and match supply with demand.

In Brazil, with the closing of open-air markets and the concentration of food distribution to large supermarkets- where small farmers do not have direct entry- the small farmers movement MPA organised a distribution system with a taxi drivers' cooperative and a group of consumers. This system operates digitally via WhatsApp and a webpage with a weekly menu of available items. Today, the so-called "infobasket" reaches an average of 300 food baskets weekly, especially fresh food, reaching about 3,000 consumers in Rio de Janeiro and surroundings. About 40 "Peasant Production Units" organise the logistics.

These are all excellent locally driven initiatives that deserve our full support. The question is whether they can withstand the onslaught of the platforms and services that corporations are now developing and rolling out, which are all highly biased towards industrial agriculture. As we have seen in this report, they favour the use of chemical inputs and costly machinery, as well as the production of commodities for corporate buyers not local markets. They encourage centralisation, concentration and uniformity, and are prone to abuse and monopolisation. As such, they will only drive us deeper into the multiple crises afflicting the global food system.

This corporate take-over of digital agriculture must be resisted, everywhere. For this to happen, food producers (farmers, fisher people, small retailers, street food sellers, farm workers and others) need to work together with others to break up the power of Big Tech and its billionaires and to fight for a different vision; one based on a democratic and diverse participation in the production and sharing of knowledge and information.

Table 1. Companies and institutions moving into digital agriculture

World's biggest digital technologies corporations involvement

Developed FarmBeats project that offers an array of technology controlled through Microsoft cloud for 'data-driven' farming which monitor and analyse the condition of soils, water, crops, climatic data, up to date weather data.

Microsoft 4Afrika initiative with AGRA to build technology-based solution for agriculture in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi and Ethiopia.

Collaborates with Agworld to develop precision farming; Apple watch that works to centralise farm management giving agronomic info and crop history of the field; snapshots of the farm financials; notifications with the recommendations of the farm agronomists; and information when field is ready for harvest. Agworld Apple watch available in USA, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Chile.

Apple also issued Resolution app, a cloud based farm management software which contains a farm map to record and store day to day events or tasks on farm.

Developed Earth Map together with FAO's Hand-in-Hand geospatial platform for big data tool on climate, environment and agriculture information

Leads the offline and online merger of food retails with 12.7 billion US$ investment in physical stores and in the process for acquiring French retail Auchan's operator for another 3.6 billion US$.

Acquired 57% of shares at Milk New Zealand Dairy to ensure over 9,500 litres of milk weekly for online sale to China.

World's biggest agrochemical corporations involvement in digital agriculture

Bayer has Climate Field V iew, courtesy of Monsanto and climate.com that they acquired a couple of years ago.

BASF has Xarvio: helps identifying weeds, diseases, insects, etc. in the field and predicts when they become a problem and advises when to spray or fertilise.

BASF is now setting up a joint venture with tech giant Bosch to advance digital farming.

FMC Corp. has announced the launch of Arc farm intelligence, an exclusive precision agriculture platform that they claim enables growers and advisors to more accurately predict pest pressure before it becomes a problem.

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Digital control: how Big Tech moves into food and farming (and what it means)

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The world's biggest technology companies and distribution platforms, such as Microsoft and Amazon, have started entering the food sector. What does this mean for small farmers and local food systems? This is leading to a strong and powerful integration between the companies that supply products to farmers (pesticides, tractors, drones, etc) and those that control the flow of data and have access to food consumers.

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Digital agriculture, as being proposed by giant agribusiness and data companies, should come with a warning for farmers, farm workers and food vendors. Read our blog below to find out about why in more detail (with examples) and about alternative approaches (also with some real world, feasible examples). But if you are short of time, check out our bullet point 'what to watch out for' summary:

Giving data away to large companies enriches them and makes them more powerful, further skewing the balance of power in the Industrial Food Chain

Signing up with a digital ag company could lock you into a contract that will force you to buy the products they promote and sell on credit (at high prices), follow chatbot advice to qualify for insurance (which you must pay for), and receive payment via a digital money app (for which there is a fee).

If you make any mistakes or do not comply, it could potentially affect your credit worthiness and future access to finance and markets.

Even if a company declares it will share some of the risk with you, you may find yourself locked into selling your farm products to just one company at a price determined by their algorithm (potentially on the basis of unknown criteria).

You may be forbidden from repairing the equipment on your farm.

You may find land rents and prices increasing as data companies identify and micro-target the most productive land and buy it up.

You may find your jobs replaced by machines such as robots and drones.

You may find that you are expected to work at the same pace as a robot, perhaps by wearing robotic devices, even though this has already been leading to more accidents.

Food vendors:

You may find that giant data platforms skew food distribution routes, inserting themselves as middlemen between farmers and consumers, and excluding food vendors (this has already happened around Nairobi).

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What is digitalization in the food system?

In the last few years, food corporations have been getting bigger and fewer. At ETC Group, we've been tracking this trend of mergers and consolidation in the food system. At the moment, four corporations control over half of the commercial seed market and two thirds of the agrichemical market. These companies are Bayer (which bought up Monsanto), Corteva Agriscience, Syngenta and BASF. These mergers will continue and we're likely to see new mergers in the future. Similar trends are occurring in other sectors like farm machinery, where the top 6 farm equipment companies (including John Deere) control 52% of the global market.

However, there is a new trend developing in addition to this: the digitalization of agriculture. The same agri-giants that grew rich and powerful from the industrial food system are now combining their power with that of data giants. The overall logic is towards an integration between the companies that supply products to farmers (pesticides, tractors, drones, etc.) and those that control the flow of data.

When wielded by technology firms, data can be an extremely valuable resource. Although many of us give away our data without even realizing it, it increases in value as more of it is hoarded, aggregated and analysed. Thus digital farming involves farmers handing over data to corporations to analyse. This is presented to farmers as a way of making their farms more efficient so that they can make a greater return on their investments. But while farmers may think they are receiving a service from companies like Bayer, these companies are actually mining farmer's data for free and hoarding it to increase their power.

How does Digital Farming work?

One example of digital farming is the data platform Climate Fieldview which is owned by Bayer. It was developed by The Climate Corporation, a Silicon Valley start-up bought up by Monsanto in 2013 for around $1 billion [1]. At the time, people were shocked that Monsanto, a seed, pesticide and agricultural biotechnology company, would buy a digital platform about weather information - what was the relationship? Well, it seems that someone from Monsanto had the foresight to imagine that in a few years, Monsanto might decide to become a technology information company collecting and using agricultural data.

Today, Climate Fieldview claims [2] to collect data that covers 60 million hectares in 23 countries. It offers specific services like providing information about the state of a farmer's soil. It also had a feature called Xarvio SCOUTING [3] where a farmer could take pictures of diseases on their crops and then upload these pictures onto a cloud where they were compared with some 100,000 photos Bayer already had. The platform could then suggest to the farmer which Bayer products and herbicides they should use against the disease. Xarvio was acquired by BASF in 2018.

There are already many similar data platforms, owned by big agricultural giants like Corteva, BASF, Yara and John Deere. They extract data on seeds, soil, fertilizer and weather for their Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems to use, and in turn they suggest what and when farmers should farm and what products they should use. In the developing world, these services - especially those from startup companies - are marketed as being free to use. Nevertheless, data is being collected from farmers for free and used by the companies, almost like another giant commercial harvest that they can profit from. But there's even more to it than that - the digitalization of agriculture threatens to bring many more problems for farmers as we shall see.
Which digital farming platforms are already in Africa?

Microsoft's Azure Farmbeats

Over the past two decades tech billionaire Bill Gates has poured a huge amount of money into getting small farmers in the Global South to adopt what he calls the most highly advanced seeds, pesticides and fertilisers [4], sold by the world's largest agribusiness corporations through programmes like the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). However, adoption rates for these technologies has remained low so far, so Gates has been banking on digital agriculture to help.

In September 2020, Microsoft and AGRA began to expand Microsoft's digital platform Azure FarmBeats with a "chatbot" app called Kuzabot [5]. This app provides small farmers with advice via WhatsApp and SMS, including information on what inputs to use and which companies to buy from. At the same time, Microsoft's FarmBeats is integrating the US-based start-up Climate Edge into its platform. Climate Edge aggregates data on small farmers supplied by agricultural consultants, NGOs, companies, and researchers and then sells this information onwards to insurance companies, pesticide dealers, and large food companies like Unilever and even NGOs [6].

Arifu

The leading provider of "chatbot" advisory services to small farmers in Kenya, Arifu, is partnered with multinational seeds and pesticides company Syngenta. Arifu essentially "creates a demand for Syngenta seeds." [7] It is now part of a larger digital platform in Kenya called Digifarm, operated by the mobile network operator Safaricom (which is owned by UK company Vodaphone). Digifarm provides millions of small farmers in Kenya with chatbot services like Arifu, sells them inputs and crop insurance, offers them loans, and buys and sells their produce, all via M-PESA, a mobile money transfer service. For this, Safaricom charges a fee on all transactions.

Digifarm, and similar platforms in other parts of the world, say they are providing financial services to rural people who would not otherwise be able to access them. However, this obscures what is really happening. Farmers must conform to this system: they must buy the inputs that are promoted and sold on credit (at high interest rates); follow the "advice" of the chatbot to qualify for crop insurance (which they must pay for); sell their crops to the company (at a non-negotiable price); and receive payments on a digital money app (for which there is a fee). Any missteps can affect a farmer's credit worthiness and access to finance and markets. According to the organization GRAIN, this is essentially "contract farming on a mass scale." [8]

What about automation? Is that also part of digital farming?

Yes. The vision of digital farming being pushed onto farmers includes automation. This includes the use of drones. Agriculture is set to become the sector with the second largest use of drones, both for scouting the farm and capturing images and for the application of pesticides. Automation will also involve a massive uptake of robots, especially mini-robots that can weed, pick berries and deal with pests.

The overall idea of digital farming is to bring many of these processes and technologies together: drones, extraction of data, robots, smart farming systems, etc. It essentially comes down to creating a food system stripped of all direct human relations with the soil, plants and living matter, mediated by data-driven corporate strategies.

What are some other possible impacts of digital farming?

Some of the main concerns and issues with digital farming are the following:

A lack of control and ownership

When farmers buy equipment like tractors from John Deere, they must sign up for certain conditions with respect to the data that John Deere will gather from the tractor. In addition, farmers are sometimes forbidden from repairing their own equipment. This raises a number of concerns about losing control and ownership over both data and the tools used in farming.

Destroying the livelihoods of food vendors

These new agricultural technologies are being introduced within an ideological "framing" advanced by powerful companies, which promotes their commercial interests. Some of them start out with the claim or the intention of benefitting small farmers and food sellers.

One example is Twiga Foods in Kenya, an agri-tech start-up company founded by a US academic who wanted to connect farmers to small vendors, bypassing powerful food cartels. Twiga Foods built up a fleet of trucks to source foods from farmers outside of Nairobi, and then deliver this food directly to a network of small vendors in the city. All of the transactions were organised through cell phones and run on Microsoft's digital platform and Azure's cloud services. Twiga's early success caught the attention of larger companies. Goldman Sachs and the French family that owns the Auchan supermarket chain took major stakes in the company and then Twiga partnered with IBM, another top cloud services provider, to pilot a digital banking scheme with its vendors. Twiga is now selling foods directly to consumers - cutting out the small vendors it was initially established to serve. Twiga's more significant impact is that it has refashioned food distribution, using pretty much the same workforce, to enable corporations to insert themselves in the middle and extract wealth.

Pushing up cost of land

In 2020, the Bayer Fieldview app signed an agreement with Tillable, a company which calls itself the "Airbnb of farmland." They are building a database of farmland which can be rented out to farmers. After this agreement, it seems that some tenant farmers who used Fieldview began to receive demands from their landlords to pay higher land rent. It appeared that Tillable had taken Bayer's Fieldview production data and used it to revalue land, and had then approached owners to acquire the land leases, renting the land out at higher rates.

Selling data: to whom?

When data is aggregated from many farmers, it no longer belongs to them and it can be sold on to third parties. Climate Fieldview, the platform now owned by Monsanto, has made agreements with drone companies, farm machinery companies like John Deere, and weather companies to share and use the data that they collect. While it sounds as if this model of digital agriculture might help farmers, the data that is being extracted from them is extremely valuable and it is unclear who it is being shared with and sold to, and what it is being used for and to what end. Many technology companies are in turn owned by shadowy asset management companies like Vanguard and Blackrock. It is unclear if they are also getting this data from farmers (in an aggregated form) and if so, what impact this will have on small farmers.

Lock-ins

In some instances a farmer can sign up to Bayer's Fieldview app for close to free, and in return, they are promised certain returns. For instance, if they use Fieldview's prescriptions about how and what to farm, they may be promised that they will be able to sell their produce at a certain rate. Bayer is experimenting with 'outcome-based pricing' plans: if the farmer is not able to sell the produce, Bayer will make up the difference, but if they do sell the produce for more than the rate prescribed by the app, Bayer will receive more than half of the difference. The farmer has no insight into how these calculations are made or whether they are fair - they are created by an algorithm, which is so hard to understand that it acts like a "black box." Bayer claims that this model works for farmers since they are sharing the risk with the farmer, but what it really means is that farmers are both passing on their data to the company and agreeing to buy their products, locking them into a relationship with the company which the company will use to extract ever more value from them.

Robots versus farm workers

The agricultural industry is notorious for exploiting workers and treating people as disposable labour. This is evident in the case of seasonal migrant workers in North America for example. With the introduction of robots into digital farming, there is even less need to hire skilled workers and migrant labour. In some cases, robots are being used to augment or enhance the labour of workers. In Japan for instance, pickers wear automated arms to increase their ability and the speed with which they can pick things up. Roboticizing workers has led to serious bodily injuries. One of the industries that has been highly robotized is Amazon's warehouses; workers are more controlled, they are directed as robots would be and they are expected to process items faster and faster - again, leading to injuries. An investigation into worker injuries in warehouses which had robots found that injuries were 50% higher than in warehouses that did not use robots [9].

Money in speculative assets

Digital agriculture companies claim that they can reduce climate-damaging carbon emissions and create carbon sequestration in the soil by using sensors and providing automated prescriptions for climate-friendly farming practices.

They then collect the data from these sensors, or the promise that farmers are following certain practices, to generate "carbon credits" that can be sold to carbon markets. Bayer for instance has its own carbon trading platform. A large amount of profit lies in these speculative assets, through carbon credits being sold from digital farming. There is now concern that these techniques may not ultimately store much carbon, but carbon credits are still being bought by polluting industries, giving them a free pass on the basis that they are "offsetting" their carbon emissions. Furthermore, in the process of generating carbon credits these systems do not count the carbon produced for energy to power digital processing, movement and storage of data.

A solution to climate change? Not quite

It is easy to believe that digitalization will lead to lower emissions and therefore to combating climate change. But the opposite may be true - data may in fact be part of creating rather than reducing climate emissions. Data is not intangible: it is energy, and it requires a huge amount of infrastructure including wires, cables etc., which in turn rely on energy and involve water consumption, chemical waste production and the mining of minerals. Digitalization will generate a huge amount of data which has to be stored and processed: by 2025, it is estimated that a fifth of global electricity consumption will be taken up by data - that is equivalent to 14% of global emissions. Artificial Intelligence, likewise, requires a huge amount of energy. Training one AI system can be the equivalent of traveling 700,000 km by car [10].

What if the whole system gets hacked or the internet goes down?

If the entire food production system depends on data and data networks, what happens to food security if it goes wrong or if the data networks fail? We do not know why an AI makes the decisions it makes. A typical example of the dangers of this unknowability is when a self-driving Uber car dependent on AI killed a 49-year-old woman pushing a bicycle because the algorithm did not see or recognize her [11]. Uber, the company who owned the car, was found not responsible for her death because it was a computing mistake. So if the entire food system becomes dependent on a system reliant on AI and it is not clear exactly how it works, who will be responsible when something goes wrong? Making food dependent on digital infrastructure also makes it a target for cyber attacks.

Can digital farming be done differently to be beneficial to farmers? Are people fighting back?

For digital farming to be in any way beneficial for farmers, they would have to take back control over their data from giant tech and agriculture firms and acquire the capacity to benefit from it by also having the capacity for high-power data processing. Publicly-generated environmental data, genetic data, weather data and agronomic data must, at the very least, remain in the public sphere, free from commercial exploitation.

Some initiatives offer free and open source technology that is not controlled by those who own patents or gather data. One example is the Farm Hack Initiative, a global collaborative platform for sharing farm tools and knowledge among farmers from across the world. Farm Hack is part of the Right to Repair movement, which is an important part of questioning the role of data in food systems and asserting people's rights and control over data and data-driven technologies.

Farmers and communities would also need to expose and challenge the attractive deals and free apps extended by technology companies keen to suck up knowledge and data to improve their algorithms and machine learning capacities. These companies must be required to obtain the Free Prior and Informed Consent of farmers and communities before collecting data from their fields and agricultural practices.

What other alternatives exist to digital agriculture?

Agroecology, also known as ecologically-just forms of ecological food production, builds on existing practices by smallholders and peasant farmers and is the best way forward for creating robust food systems that benefit farmers, small vendors and consumers. Several groups across the African continent including the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) and COPAGEN are advocating for agroecology.

Mutual aid networks can connect smallholder food producers with local consumers, in the midst of disruptions in export markets and commercial supply chains, e.g. during lockdowns. For example, in Karnataka in India, farmers started using Twitter to post videos of their produce and connect with buyers during the COVID pandemic. This can re-create mutual aid networks between producers and consumers, removing the powerful cartels that have come in between.

Technology assessment (TA) is fundamental to provoking debate and ideas about what could be a fair, just and ecologically sustainable use of digital technologies that serve the common good. Participatory Technology Assessment is a process that enables civil society, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, farmers, fisherfolk, and popular and social movements to come together and evaluate new and emerging technologies as well as examining the interests and powers behind the introduction of new technologies, the ways in which those technologies are applied, and their potential impacts on the environment and communities.

For more information on digital agriculture, please see the following resources :

Blocking the Chain: Industrial Food Chain concentration, Big Data Platforms and food sovereignty solutions.

A report by ETC Group, GLOCON, INKOTA and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.
https://www.etcgroup.org/content/blocking-chain
Available in English and Spanish

Digital control: how Big Tech moves into food and farming (and what it means)

A report by GRAIN.org
https://grain.org/en/article/6595-digital-control-how-big-tech-moves-into-food-and-farming-and-what-it-means
(available in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish)

Big Brother is Coming to the Farm

An animation on digital agriculture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snYD7X3edMs
(available in English, French, Italian (captions), Japanese (captions), Spanish, and Swahili)

Big Data, Big Questions

NFUniversity presentation by Jim Thomas, ETC Group (video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ytAKzKN90s
(in English)

Plate Tech-tonics: A report on mapping corporate power in big food
https://etcgroup.org/content/plate-tech-tonics
(available in English and Spanish)

Jack and the Cloud Giant

A story about precision agriculture available as a podcast and in print: https://www.etcgroup.org/content/jack-and-cloud-giant

(available in English, French, Italian and Spanish)

References

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/02/monsanto-acquires-weather-big-data-company-climate-corporation-for-930m/

[2]

https://www.futurefarming.com/smart-farming/tools-data/bayers-digital-arm-is-being-rolled-out-in-europe/

[3] https://www.xarvio.com/global/en/products/scouting.html

[4] [5] [6] [7] [8] https://grain.org/en/article/6595-digital-control-how-big-tech-moves-into-food-and-farming-and-what-it-means

[9] https://revealnews.org/article/how-amazon-hid-its-safety-crisis/

[10] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/tsunami-of-data-could-consume-fifth-global-electricity-by-2025

and
https://www.wired.com/story/ai-great-things-burn-planet/
[11] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/uber-driverless-fatality.html

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Did you know that the digitalization of agriculture could affect farmers' rights?

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Digital agriculture, as being proposed by giant agribusiness and data companies, should come with a warning for farmers, farm workers and food vendors. Read our blog below to find out about why in more detail (with examples) and about alternative approaches (also with some real world, feasible examples).