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Info Service on Sustainable Agriculture The Hunger for Data in Agriculture Control over agricultural data is becoming a primary mechanism to increase corporate profit and power over food, often deepening the extractive and exploitive logic that has historically shaped the global food system. Drawing from a recent publication from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), Head in the Cloud, this article examines how and by whom digital technologies must be designed and governed to contribute to just and sustainable food systems. With
best wishes, —————————————————————————————————— THE HUNGER FOR DATA IN AGRICULTURE Chantal Wei-Ying Clément, Saskia Colombant, Lim Li Ching June 2026 Digitalization deepens inequality in food systems. But who is in control of technology and monetization of data? In May 2026, the Gates Foundation announced a $200 million partnership with AI company Anthropic, which will use the Claude AI model to deliver personalized planting advice to farmers in low- and middle-income countries. In 2025, Bosch announced a $40 million investment to expand its digital agriculture operations in Brazil and Argentina, including the rollout of its automated seeding technology, the Intelligent Planting Solution. These initiatives epitomize the dominant narrative about agricultural innovation today: rapid digitalization of agriculture will ensure food system sustainability and resilient livelihoods. Yet a deeper story reveals how digital agriculture is entrenching who has power in food systems – power over knowledge, data, land, seeds, and ultimately on how our food is produced. Drawing on findings from IPES-Food’s report, Head in the Cloud, we consider how control over agricultural data is becoming a primary mechanism to increase corporate profit and power over food, often deepening the extractive and exploitive logic that has historically shaped the global food system. Ultimately, we ask how and by whom digital technologies must be designed and governed to contribute to just and sustainable food systems. Over the past decade, tech giants including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Alibaba, and Meta, have been leveraging their advances in cloud storage and AI tools to develop platforms and data processing software to store and analyze field and weather data. The result is a tightly-knit web of Big Tech companies and leading farm machinery and agrochemical companies, integrating farming equipment, agrochemical inputs, and data-driven tools under the banner of digital agriculture. For example, the Climate FieldView app, developed through a collaboration between Microsoft and Bayer, processes data from hundreds of million hectares of farmland each year. The digitalization of agriculture is creating new ways for companies to accumulate power and profit: the knowledge and information built and shared by farmers and communities – from the soil composition they have nurtured to yield histories and input practices – are systematically extracted, appropriated, processed, and turned into corporate assets. In practice, corporations extract economic data and value from the farm through multiple and interconnected mechanisms, including subscription-based platforms, data-sharing arrangements between corporate partners, or algorithm-driven price-setting that undermines farmers’ bargaining power. In other words, agribusinesses increasingly hold disproportionate control and ownership over agricultural technologies and the troves of historical and current farming, land, and weather data they collect, deepening dependency and weakening farmer agency. When seeds become data: the example of biodigitalization Today, the logic of digitalization is rapidly extending beyond farm machinery and agrichemical input use. Biodigitalization is now making it possible to translate plant genetic material into digital information, as Big Data, AI, and synthetic biology converge to sequence, patent, and commodify the biological information of plants and animals. Biodigitalization is best understood as the continuation of a history of privatizing seeds and genetic resources through intellectual property rights. From the US Plant Patent Act of 1930, the establishment of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) in 1961, and the WTO’s Agreement on Trade‑Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in 1995, legal frameworks have progressively extended proprietary control over plant varieties, to the benefit of major seed companies and to the detriment of the diverse, community‑managed seed systems that provide the basis for local and regional food production worldwide. The commercialization of plant breeding has enabled corporate actors to capitalize on both nature and Indigenous and traditional farming knowledge – with little to no benefit-sharing for local communities. The term “biopiracy” is often used to describe this theft of biological materials, traditional knowledge, and livelihoods without recognition or compensation, a pattern rooted in colonial legacies and reproduced by governments, private actors, and research institutions. In particular, women and Indigenous communities in the Global South, as custodians of traditional seed systems, bear disproportionate costs from this privatization. These dynamics are now being amplified by biodigitalization. Enormous amounts of genetic data are compiled into public digital databases that can be exploited by private actors to develop and patent seeds. Tech giant Nvidia and the Arc Institute developed Evo 2, the largest biology foundation model in existence, trained on over 9 trillion DNA and RNA nucleotides from 128,000 genomes. Start-ups including Sweden-based OlsAro are developing climate-resilient crops using AI-enabled trait discovery. Proponents argue that such models can predict how seeds perform under specific environmental conditions, catalogue genetic diversity, and identify resilience traits in heirloom and wild crop relatives – yet, they pose significant risk. The genetic information fed into these models has been developed and preserved over millennia by farmers, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities, particularly in highly biodiverse regions in the Global South. When corporations use AI to rapidly scan, characterize, modify, and patent genetic traits, they effectively appropriate seeds that communities have long saved and shared freely. Ultimately, digital technologies are being wielded by corporations to further commodify life, in direct conflict with seed and data sovereignty, and broader human rights. Invisibilized land and labour: the physical costs of Cloud-based systems Corporate-led digitalization is also exacerbating inequities between the Global North and Global South beyond the food system. The raw materials needed to build digital infrastructure are overwhelmingly mined in the Global South – including cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo, lithium from Bolivia, copper from Chile, or coltan from Rwanda. For local communities, mining has been a key driver of land dispossession and water pollution. Digital agriculture infrastructure also relies on precarious work in the Global South. In particular, the invisibilized workers who label data for AI training (e.g., by categorizing, transcribing, labeling, or moderating information) are often employed under extremely tenuous working conditions resembling modern slavery, including in Brazil, India, Kenya, the Philippines, Uganda, or Venezuela. AI systems across the Global South also remain highly reliant on foreign providers, with profits remaining primarily in the Global North. These multiple forms of extractivism only compound long histories of colonial extraction from the Global South by the Global North that have driven land dispossession, erosion of local food systems, debt and greater dependence on external inputs. Data and technological sovereignty as frameworks for resistance Ensuring that food systems are just, fair, and resilient requires a reorientation of how data and digital technologies are organized and governed. As it stands, corporate‑led digitalization provides neither equity nor sustainability. It deepens dependency, concentrates power, and sidelines the knowledge, agency, and control of those who produce our food. Our aim here is not to promote the abandonment of all digital tools, but to embed them within governance frameworks that serve the public good and the rights of farmers, local communities, and Indigenous Peoples over the logics of profit and false efficiencies of dominant corporate actors. To do so, data sovereignty must become a foundational principle to shape food and agricultural systems. Data sovereignty means that farmers, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities have the right to decide what data is collected from their lands, how it is stored, who can access it, and what it is used for. Examples of rights-based and structural data justice frameworks already exist, including the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance or the Māori Data Sovereignty framework. International recommendations to support data justice include the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE-FSN)’s Data Collection and Analysis Tools for food security and nutrition. Digital commons-based and cooperative models could also be better supported to ensure data serves the public good – for example, data trusts, data cooperatives, national or regional digital commons frameworks, open-source digital tools and platforms. This will require appropriate regulatory frameworks and long-term public investment to ensure the democratic oversight needed to support these more equitable and accountable models. More broadly, rights-based governance will need to align with existing international agreements including the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and its Nagoya Protocol, for the collection, storage, access, and use of genetic and biological material and data. This coherence is essential to ensure transparent oversight of public and private databases, and protect the rights of farmers, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities, including by ensuring fair and equitable benefit-sharing. This will also require establishing clearer definitions and protections of public and private agricultural data to safeguard farmers’ rights, and prevent misappropriation and misuse. Conclusion The digitalization of agriculture is often presented as a solution to food systems’ most urgent challenges. Currently, however, digitalization is largely serving to entrench the power of major tech and agricultural corporations. In the Global South, this is translating into deeper dependence on imported technologies and infrastructure, growing pressures on local seed systems, land, and labour, and new forms of extraction that build on colonial injustices. However, technology and its narratives are always political, and can therefore be designed and steered in ways that strengthen farmer and community agency, support ecosystem health, and protect individual and collective rights over data and knowledge. Developing digital tools and other technologies that truly serve just and sustainable food systems will require more than investment dollars or political will; it requires the creation of physical, social, and ecological infrastructure stemming from and responding to farmers, local communities, and Indigenous Peoples’ needs. Chantal Wei-Ying Clément, Saskia Colombant, and Lim Li Ching are Senior Program Manager (UK), Research and Project Officer (Belgium) and Co-Chair of IPES-Food, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems.
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