Tech firms and AI farming tools ‘playing with the food system’, warns thinktank | Global development

Tech companies and industrial agriculture are “gaming the food system” by using AI and algorithms to prevent farmers from choosing what the world eats, leading food safety experts have warned.

Companies including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and Alibaba are working with industrial agricultural companies to influence which crops are grown and how, according to a report from the think tank International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food).

The result, experts say, is a “top-down” approach to agricultural systems in which big companies tell farmers what to grow, often focusing on the most productive and profitable crops.

“Corporations are gaming the food system, and we can’t afford to game that,” said Pat Mooney, a Canadian author and agriculture expert who contributed to the Head in the Cloud report, adding that these companies tend to focus on just five crops: corn, rice, wheat, soybeans and potatoes.

“Their advice will be, ‘Well, we don’t know if you use [the grain] teff in Ethiopia – we have never heard of teff – but we know how to use corn in Ethiopia, so we will advise you on ways to use corn, and we know how to combine corn with pesticides, because that is our expertise,” he said.

Farmers risk being locked into a globalized system in which, instead of growing locally adapted crops that they have grown for generations, they are forced to buy seeds made by industrial companies that come with machinery and chemical inputs from other parts of the world, Mooney added.

He said the globalized food system has already shown that it is vulnerable to shocks, such as the climate crisis or the war in Ukraine.

“The more global the system is, the harder it is to guarantee that it will actually work, and food security is something that really needs to be as local as possible,” he said. “Don’t lock yourself into a global system that is broken and beyond repair. Why would we make it even more globalized than before and more dependent on multinational corporations that operate out of Silicon Valley?”

Tech companies are powering their algorithms and AI models with data collected from farmers and tools such as satellite and drone sensors that can monitor climate conditions and soil health. They then use this information to advise farmers on what should be grown, for example by suggesting that a particular seed would be suited to the soil moisture in their area.

But Mooney said those suggestions would likely focus only on crops that companies are interested in and that would require the farmer to purchase seeds, equipment and inputs such as fertilizer.

The report warns that these digital tools are presented as innovative and so easily attract the attention of policymakers and investors. This means that even if farmers are hesitant to adopt advice from tech companies, their governments could promote it as a way forward.

The market for using digital tools in agriculture was worth $30 billion last year and is expected to reach $84 billion by 2034, according to forecaster Fortune Business Insights. The report also states that the World Bank has funded $1.15 billion in loans for digital agriculture projects and the EU has spent €200 million on research in this area.

Lim Li Ching, co-chair of IPES-Food, said “algorithmic farming” is not something farmers want and there should be more focus on a bottom-up approach that prioritizes farmers’ knowledge and needs.

“Innovation that really works for people must be rooted in their realities… [It should support them] as guardians and stewards of agricultural biodiversity,” Lim said. “[We need] innovations that truly support sustainability, that empower farmers, that are locally governed, and that can strengthen agroecological practices and not further consolidate industrial agriculture, monocultures, or heavily chemical-driven agriculture.

She said these examples already exist, started by farming communities in places like Peru, where families protect hundreds of varieties of potatoes; in China, where farmers save seeds; and in Tanzania, where they use social media to communicate with each other about weather conditions and market prices.

Mooney said policymakers should focus on funding research with these local farmers and supporting their innovations.

“Food security must really be as local as possible, which is the advantage of agroecology: we are not locked into a global system which is broken and which cannot be repaired.”

Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and Alibaba have been contacted for comment.