Eight out of ten of the world’s biggest firms now make their money by acting as platforms for digitalisation. The Covid pandemic saw mega-corporations accelerate their attempts to digitalise our food and farming systems. Misleadingly presented as having greater “precision”, these approaches to farming are merely the result of digital entrepreneurs teaming up with big tech firms seeking to achieve dominance in the market. Some of the world’s biggest agri-tech corporations, including Bayer-Monsanto, John Deere and ChemChina, have recently joined forces with data giants such as Amazon and Microsoft to turn farmer knowledge as well as the behaviour of everyone in the food chain into computer code. The ‘artificial intelligence’ they are creating by applying algorithms to this data is being deployed in order to control land and water resources previously controlled by local communities.

Evoking past colonial practices, corporations are now using digital tools to entrench industrialised farming methods into the practices of small-scale farming and fishing communities. Current trends in digitalisation thus threaten biodiversity, the wider environment and human health. So far, few have challenged  the tech industry’s hype about this ‘fourth industrial revolution’. This session will outline the issues, based on ETC’s recently-published report Food Barons, explore how we can assess the pros and cons of digital technologies, and spark a discussion of how popular movements can resist their advance.