Technology for digital agriculture is rarely developed to meet the needs of farmers. First of all, they must make a profit to the largest players in the market.
Kavya Chowdhry, an Indian researcher at the international organization ETC group, presented at the Oxford (United Kingdom) farming conference the conclusions about technology, the power of enterprises and their impact on farmers.
The conclusions are based on studies conducted by the ETC group. For the past four decades, it has been monitoring the concentration of power of enterprises in 11 food and agriculture-related sectors.
“This historical observation helps to compare how the concentration of enterprises in the industrial food and agriculture sector is changing and what strategies corporations are adopting to increase their control,” Ms. Chowdhry said.
A study by the ETC Group showed that the four largest companies with the largest market share in the agrochemical sector own 62% of the world market.
In the agricultural seed sector, six companies control 58% of the market. “25 years ago, 10 companies controlled 40 percent of the seed market, and now only two companies own 40 percent of the market.
According to K. Chowdhry, technologies are not neutral and most of them are introduced without the active participation of small food producers.
To “catch” farmers into networks
“Technology is rarely developed to meet the needs of small farmers. Most often, they are designed to “catch” farmers into networks of profit-making schemes, turning them into sources of data and behavior patterns that can be used for machine learning, making decisions without farmers, reducing their qualifications. This increases their dependence on corporations,” the researcher said.
Eight out of ten of the world’s largest companies now earn by acting as digitization platforms. During the COVID-19 pandemic, megacorporations have accelerated their attempts to digitize food and farming systems.
The new farming methods, which are presented as more accurate, are often the result of the collaboration of digital entrepreneurs with large technology companies seeking to dominate the market.
Farmers knowledge into computer code
“Some of the world’s largest agritech corporations have recently joined forces with data giants Amazon and Microsoft to turn farmers’ knowledge and the behavior of all people in the food chain into computer code,” the conference said.
According to Chowdhry, the new technologies bear part of the blame for the climate crisis, which has been exacerbated by the extraction of mineral resources, increased energy consumption and the production of toxic waste.
“In many cases, digitalization is being implemented without adequate data protection guarantees, environmental impact assessments and human rights safeguards,” she concluded.