Your food is just a mouse click away. Or is it?

The Digital Alarmist

Now that AI technology has inserted itself into search engines, text processing, and audio and video processing, for good or for ill, the push is on for this technology to bring agriculture under its ambit. Nowhere is this push made clearer than in the March 2021 community paper published by the World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Titled ‘AI4AI’ (an acronym for AI for Agriculture Innovation), it is an initiative by the Government of Telangana’s Centre for Responsible Deployment of Emerging Technologies, in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog, and the Ministry of Electronics.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution revolves around emerging technologies which include the Internet of

Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Big Data, drones and Blockchain. According to the position paper’s authors, the agriculture sector in India has been slow to harness the power of these technologies, owing mostly to small farm sizes, lack of telecom infrastructure in rural areas, minimal farm mechanisation, and poor farming practices, resulting in soil degradation and water stress.

The Telangana centre has partnered with a range of stakeholders from agriculture-related industries, start-ups, and academia. Telangana, it must be noted, is where Cyberabad (the ‘other’ Bangalore) is located. According to research conducted by McKinsey and the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), there is a $65 billion opportunity in India alone to be realised through unlocking 15 critical datasets in the agricultural domain. To this end, the centre has relied on IT experts from US and Indian Big Tech (Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Google, IBM, Tech Mahindra, Microsoft, and Reliance Industries) and agribusiness conglomerates (Cargill and Bayer).

Cargill is the principal grain exporter in the US, while Bayer is the world’s leading seed and pesticide company.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, agriculture, with a labour force of 158 million, is the largest source of livelihoods in India. Seventy percent of its rural households still depend primarily on agriculture for their livelihood, with 82% of farmers being small and marginal, with land holdings of less than two hectares.

The technological basis of AI4AI was created and designed in the US to benefit agribusiness in North America and Europe, where even the small farmer’s land holdings run into hundreds or even thousands of hectares. While these land holdings are mostly mechanised and automated, the farmers are still reliant on imported migrant labour since there is an extreme shortage of native-born agricultural workers.

Reading between the lines of the World Economic Forum’s community paper, AI4AI’s real focus is not on the average Indian farmer but farmers with large land holdings and multinational corporations eager to ‘participate’ in India’s agricultural industry. There is no question that AI, Machine Learning, visual analytics data from drones, and IoT sensors that provide real-time data for algorithms increase agricultural efficiencies, improve crop yields, reduce food production costs, monitor plants’ relative health levels and identify pest infestations.

However, the basic question that needs to be asked is whether the wholesale importation of technological artifices and ideas is relevant to the average farmer. The average farmer, many of whom are either illiterate or semi-literate with little or no formal schooling, is clueless as to what IT is all about, let alone its specialised vocabulary. Asking the farmers to subscribe to expensive agricultural datasets or buy/lease drones and sensors when they are already facing formidable challenges to their income levels is cruel and unwarranted.

Do we really want the zamindars of yesterday being replaced by the IT Czars of today, especially when at least the former are in constant touch with tenant farmers and know their plight while the latter have, in all likelihood, never set foot on a farm?

AI4AI will certainly lead to a certain blindness but, more importantly, should it also lead to starvation?