From Bot Populi, May 30:
We are handing the keys of the food system to data giants, but does Big Tech really have the answers?
What started as a trickle has now become a deluge. As the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and the ETC Group warned in their 2021 Long Food Movement report, the fourth industrial revolution is sweeping through food systems – driven by rapid advances in digitalization, automation, and molecular technologies. Developments that sounded like science fiction are suddenly on our farms and our plates, while others are close to mass commercialization. For instance, as many as 11,000 drones are already used in French agriculture. Farmers in China can deploy pig facial recognition technologies. Lab-grown chicken can be consumed in Singapore. Online food retail doubled in the US through the pandemic and is still growing, while Walmart and other food industry giants are snapping up e-retail platforms in India, and across Asia. The global food automation industry was already worth USD 12 billion in 2020 and is projected to more than double in size by 2026.
As various innovations enter the marketplace, Big Tech’s vision for food systems is coming into view. It is a vision in which data transforms every link along the food chain. Over the coming years, we could be looking at food systems where algorithms are used to optimize growing conditions on every fertile square meter of land, drones and surveillance systems manage farms, foods are grown in petri dishes, vats, and bioreactors, and, where commodities flow seamlessly across vast economic corridors, thanks to data-mediated food logistics systems and blockchains.
In addition, technological innovations are also bringing us towards a world where diets are personalized and delivered to the doorstep in multiple forms. Where artificial intelligence (AI) assistant apps decide on people’s food intake based on genetic information, family history, mood, and data readings from their fitness apps, shopping histories, their waste bins, and even from inside their digestive systems.
With agribusinesses ready to double down on these innovation pathways, investors ready to bankroll them, and governments poised to give their green light, it is crucial to press pause and question the underlying assumptions of these pipeline transformations. As successive Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports have told us, today’s industrial food systems are in need of a major overhaul: they are driving up to a third of climate change, generating unprecedented biodiversity loss, and failing to deliver decent livelihoods for farmers, or sufficient diets for the world’s poorest populations. But is the Big Tech vision really up to the challenge? Are these technologies really setting us on a pathway to just, sustainable, and resilient food systems? When we dig down, it is clear that Big Tech’s “solutions” leave many questions unanswered, and in fact risk making food systems even more inequitable and unsustainable....
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