Platform for African – European Partnership in Agricultural Research for Development

Monday, March 14, 2022

Surveillance agriculture and peasant autonomy

5 January 2022. Surveillance agriculture and peasant autonomy

‘Big Data’ digital technologies are beginning to make inroads into peasant agriculture in the Global South. Of particular importance is the subset of technologies that appropriate agricultural decision-making, here theorized as surveillance agriculture. These technological regimes aspire to not only remove decision-making from the farmer, but eventually to replace the farmer with, for instance, ‘autonomous’ tractors. 

This paper looks ahead to ask what a technological trajectory that aspires to autonomy for the tractor may portend for autonomy for the peasant farmer. It compares surveillance agriculture to other forms of surveillance capitalism, noting that it shares a will to not only sell products and services but to manipulate behaviour but differs in that the behaviour being manipulated is professional productive behaviour. 

The paper surveys the vested interests of the entities behind surveillance agriculture and asks how informational relations of production may be changed between farmers and these entities. It then examines the informational relations of production among peasant farmers that may be interdicted by surveillance agriculture, especially the group-level decision-making dynamics that make ‘individual autonomy’ a misnomer. But surveillance agriculture is resolutely individualized, which raises concerns for peasant decision-making autonomy.

Surveillance agriculture largely removes the farmer from decision-making

Extracts:
p.2 The digital technologies known as precision agriculture (PA) are the most widely used, including detailed soil mapping; ‘variable rate application’ control of seeding, fertilizing, irrigating and spraying; automatic machine guidance; and autonomous vehicles.

p.2 Digital agriculture increasingly has the Global South in its sights (...) Less a revolution than an evolution’, writes Miles, ‘precision agriculture is conventional agriculture’ .

p.5 Technologies for delivering generic information—the non-surveilling end of the continuum —have
appeared in many areas of the Global South in recent decades. In this, India has been a leader, with its advanced ICT sector and large population of peasant farmers reliant on simple technology. (...) The next step along the continuum would be technologies that provide specific advice in response to farmer
requests. The responses may be generated automatically

 

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