Technological autonomy not autonomous technology

A call for collaboration for organizations and groups working in open source and grassroots agricultural technology and innovation.

By : Samuel Oslund, Severine Fleming, Andrea Ferrante, Jim Thomas

Summary :

This working paper is a call for collaboration between organizations and networks working in open source and grassroots agricultural technology and innovation. It is an invitation for different actors to come together in order to articulate a perspective on technological sovereignty in relation to the ongoing consolidation of Ag-tech by industry and bio/digital Big tech. It builds on the concept of food sovereignty and rights of people to define their food systems as a precedent for developing a rights-based position on innovation and technology. This paper was written in 2021 in the lead up to the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit.

The digital economy and AG 4.0

The environmental, social, and economic unsustainability of the current industrial agriculture system have long been critiqued by movements working to transform food systems. As the COVID-19 pandemic shifts, the timing and priorities of groups responding to the UN Food Systems Summit (FSS) are all the more pressing given how the ongoing health crisis has exacerbated already precarious global food systems. Calls for a just, sustainable recovery are  increasing and agriculture is at the top of many agendas as a key part of transition strategies. Indeed there is a growing acknowledgement of the transformative potential of farming and the role it can play in realizing many of the Sustainable Development Goals set out by the UN (FAO, 2019).

In the lead up to the FSS, the rhetoric of sustainability, innovation and food security have been the watchwords of state, institutional and industry leaders. Although these priorities appear to align with calls for systemic change, civil society and peasant organizations across the world have highlighted that the vision for the future of farming emerging from the FSS continues the legacy of market priorities, corporate consolidation, and industry-led technological solutions that have brought us to the current crises. Notably, agricultural innovation and technology have moved to the forefront of discussions. Speaking on a panel of experts, the Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization suggested that the work of the FAO is to rapidly scale out the digitalization of agriculture (FAO, 2021).

This is a position which mirrors that of institutions and private organizations, such as The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, that have set a target to bring half of all smallholder farmers onto digital platforms within a decade. Described as digital agriculture, this emerging innovation falls under the broad umbrella of what has been called the 4th agricultural revolution by the World Economic Forum, or AG 4.0 (Klerkx et al., 2019). From big data and precision farming to robotics and biotechnology, AG 4.0 technologies have been increasingly embraced by government, institutions and industry as a panacea for addressing issues stemming from the current industrial food system.

The promises made for AG 4.0 are that increases in efficiency through digital innovation and technology will reduce chemical usage, offer labor-saving technologies, improve supply chains and stave off environmental damage, all while feeding the growing world population and strengthening the global economy. But with the longstanding trend of industrial technology leading to increased scale and consolidation of the food system, proponents of AG 4.0 fail to critically assess the ramifications these technologies will have on the majority of food producers. By aggravating issues related to data access and privacy, loss of work through automation, erasure of traditional knowledge, and forced migration to urban centers, AG 4.0 threatens to further centralize the food system under a new biodigital hegemony (IPES-Food & ETC Group, 2021).

Moving beyond narrow sustainability metrics

Though sustainability and access to healthy food are pressing issues, as the UN Special Rapporteur highlighted in the 2010 report Agroecology and the right to food (DeSchutter, 2010), how we reach these objectives is of vital importance. The report underlines the growing potential of agroecology and the food rights movements that have coalesced around the Declaration of Food Sovereignty put forward at the Nyéléni summit in 2007 (Nyéléni, 2007). The Nyéléni Declaration articulated a vision beyond notions of food security and sustainable development, declaring the rights of people to culturally appropriate food and the right to define their own food systems.

While the widespread implementation of AG 4.0 technologies may claim to contribute to some narrowly-defined measures of environmental sustainability and food security (e.g. carbon sequestration promises), the impacts of these technologies constitute significant setbacks to advancing food sovereignty. Rather than addressing the vast disparity of access to land and resources, as big tech players expand into the agriculture sector, AG 4.0 is more likely to shore up corporate control of the food system, furthering the displacement of land and sea workers, disjointing rural communities, and eroding social and economic systems on the margins (IPES-Food & ETC Group, 2021). In this light, it is clear that the technology emerging under the banner of AG 4.0 is driving food production away from peasant control, reorienting it towards extraction based models, while favouring economic efficiency and narrow sustainability metrics over true democratic governance and community ownership. Despite these concerns, the disruption caused by the global pandemic has acted as an accelerator, ratcheting up support from industry and governments for technological solutions (FAO, 2020).

Grassroots alternatives to technological development

In response to this big tech vision of the future of food and agriculture, peasant organizations have been mobilizing in support of technological sovereignty (Clerc & Jarrige, 2020). Just as food sovereignty, based in agroecology, embraces both traditional knowledge and peasant know-how,  technological sovereignty draws on the long standing practices of farmers building their own tools and technology founded on farmer and worker knowledge. This approach stands in stark contrast to the industrial model of external, profit-oriented, expert-driven research and development that often does not account for regional and local specificities (Giotitsas, 2019). Rather than top-down development, technological sovereignty calls for grassroots innovation (Seyfang & Smith, 2007), an approach which centers the experience, traditional knowledge, and skill of food producers.

While this form of innovation is not a new phenomena, the difficulty of sourcing appropriate technology for small scale food systems has spurred the growing movement of peasant-led innovation networks that are developing and sharing novel technologies and practices adapted to agroecology. Although grassroots innovation often prioritizes accessibility and affordability, it would be a mistake to mischaracterize it as “low tech”. Indeed a better term for the breadth of approaches is “wide tech” (ETC Group). That is to say, grassroots agricultural innovation does not stand in opposition to what is typically considered high tech, but seeks to find ways to appropriate the range of technologies and practices to suit the needs of farmers. Information and communications technologies have been an important catalyst in the networking, sharing, and prototyping of these emerging technologies and practices (Bauwens et al., 2020).

• In FranceFrance, l’Atelier Paysan works with farmers across the country to build custom tools and infrastructure adapted to the needs of small scale farms ( Giotitsas, 2018). The organization hosts collaborative fabrication and training events where farmers gather to produce their own equipment. The plans for the technology are shared under creative commons licenses and hosted online.

• In India, the HoneyBee Network has documented over 100,000 examples of grassroots innovations over the last 25 years (Honeybee Network, 2015). The organization conducts rural walks throughout the country collecting, documenting and sharing peasant-developed innovations and traditional knowledge through online databases and print publications produced in local dialects.
• The U.S based organization Farmhack serves as an open source repository for farmer-developed tools which allows anyone to add, modify, or contribute to the database.
• In Canada the CAPÉ, a co-operative of over 200 farms, collaboratively designs and develops small scale farm technology, from tractor implements to greenhouse automation tools. The co-op works with regional technical schools and institutions to host fabrication events, where the cost of the final tool is dramatically reduced in comparison to those available on the market.
• These networks have spawned similar sister organizations across  Europe; with the Tzoumakers in Greece, and Farmhack Scotland and England.

While diverse in approaches, what unites these organizations and networks is their shared emphasis on peasant and farmer-led innovation, ecological sustainability, peer to peer exchange, and creative commons and open-source diffusion models. What’s more, this form of innovation goes beyond technology. In responding to a lack of appropriate tools, these grassroots innovation networks are simultaneously developing novel forms of organization, production, and knowledge exchange that trouble profit motivated, competitive models of innovation. The result is an emergent socio-technical ecosystem that supports agroecology, strengthening local and regional economies while contributing to a growing innovation commons. In addition to this critical innovation infrastructure, these networks can also foster critical discourse as well as participatory technology assessment. It is therefore not a question of whether another vision of innovation and technology in agriculture is possible. As the ongoing work of these organizations demonstrates, it is already happening.

Technological sovereignty as a integral part of food sovereignty

As nations begin to implement strategies to recover from the effects of the global pandemic, agriculture, and its potential for ecological, social, and economic transformation, is at the top of the agenda. Although this is a promising opportunity for food sovereignty movements, the rapid expansion of big tech along with the major investment by the tech industry into agriculture signals a troubling trajectory for the future of farming. Concepts like regenerative agriculture and sustainability are quickly moving to the mainstream only to be instrumentalized to justify increased digitalization, labour displacing technologies, and biotechnology ventures (IPES-Food & ETC Group, 2021).

The Nyéléni declaration of food sovereignty emphasizes the rights of people to not only have access to healthy, culturally appropriate food, but the right to define and govern their food systems. Traditional knowledge along with technology and innovation are an integral part of agroecological food systems. Therefore, the right to define the trajectory of technological innovation must be considered a critical component of food sovereignty. Across the world peasants, farmers, and workers continue to design and build tools and technology that support vibrant agricultural systems that are socially, environmentally, and economically just.

Now is the time for organizations, networks, and communities that have been developing these grassroots agricultural innovations to come together to articulate a shared perspective of how to describe, protect and strengthen community, farmer and worker-led technology. Just as the Nyéléni Declarations on food sovereignty and agroecology brought peasant rights to the forefront, a collective understanding of technological sovereignty rooted in agroecology could serve as a vital counter narrative to dominant technology and innovation models aiming to define and disrupt the future of food and agriculture.

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