Perils of digitisation in agriculture

The ubiquitous digital revolution is impacting every sector of economy and social structure. It is said to be a game-changer in agriculture too. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), digital technologies have a great potential in this field. It advocates responsible application to empower rural households and inspire youth entrepreneurship to adopt farming as a profession towards sustainable livelihoods.

The FAO has helped countries develop national e-agriculture strategies to rationalise financial and human resources to generate new revenue streams and improve the livelihood of rural communities.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data will play a dominant role in agriculture, changing the way crops are produced and marketed, with a dramatic impact on the farming community. It looks like an utopian dream in which AI solutions will be put to use for identifying pest attacks, predicting the best time to sow and gauging the best price for agro products. The use of drones, hydroponics and AI-powered cameras to prevent crop destruction by wild animals is already being tried by farmers.

The Niti Aayog has recognised AI in agriculture as one of the priority sectors aimed at realising the potential economic and social benefits so as to increase farmers' income by 15% in 2035.

With small landholdings and diverse ecological zones, are Indian farmers ready to embrace smart technology? Will this provide an opportunity to farmers to get better incomes and help overcome the hardship of access to capital, labour and market?

The strategies to implement digital tools in agriculture raise serious concerns about the prominent role assigned to technical giants. Microsoft is building the digital infrastructure and Amazon is creating a 'startup ecosystem'. India's Patanjali is creating farm management systems based on precision agriculture technologies like Internet of Things towards automated farming. The central government has already signed MoUs with these companies without any consultation with the stakeholders, especially the farming community.

Who will own and control the data is a billion dollar question. Lack of clarity on this fundamental aspect of digital technology poses moral and ethical questions, where the personal data of the farm and the farmer becomes raw material for mining information.

The experience of using digital tools in agriculture in many regions reveals the intricate relationship between farmers and agribusiness.

Indian corporate giant ITC-supported e-Choupal is an e-commerce venture hailed as a model to link farmers to markets based on digital technology. Recently, they collaborated with Bayer, a pesticide multinational, to sell its produce to farmers. Obviously, the model is used towards getting farmers hooked to their products with increased use of chemicals, leading to the poisoning of soil and water.

Though farmers might gain in the short term with increased production, the adverse long-term impact on soil and farmers' health leads to irreversible damage, destroying the regenerative capacity of resources that support life systems.

In 2014, the prime minister promised farmers to assist them in a comprehensive crop insurance scheme that would use modern technology like drones to assess damage to deliver adequate and timely relief to farmers. The hype vanished into thin air as the entire top-down process helped big private insurance companies to reap windfall profits, with meagre compensation paid to farmers who had insured their crops.

In Latin America, digitalisation has resulted in corporate land-grabbing, depriving indigenous communities of common property resources like forests and grazing land. Will these be replicated in India?

Contrary to this, there are also positive stories where farmers are using social media like WhatsApp to establish direct links with consumers, eliminating middlemen. It helps them to get remunerative prices for their produce. However, the percentage of farmers using these digital tools is negligible.

Technology, especially digital technology in agriculture, will be shaped by a few multinational corporations that have total control over data, communications and food systems.

Vandana Shiva questions the basic motive of corporates like Monsanto, “Data gathering and owning is just like another commodity to make farmers more dependent on external chemical inputs, telling farmers to outsource their minds to Monsanto. This is the next step in a dead-end future that ignores the intelligence of seeds, plants, soil organisms, our gut bacteria, our farmers, our grandmothers."

It will be too naive to expect these entities to work towards ameliorating problems faced by the farmer; rather they would use it to reinforce their power and profits, which is their main motive.

Is our government prepared to address this challenge? The authoritarian push with draconian laws despite farmers' protests indicates that it is willing to jettison the interests of farmers and give a free hand to corporate players to use digital tools to further exploit the sector under the guise of making India the 'food basket of the world'.

(The writer is a well-known environmental activist)