We have a food system that is broken in so many ways. And in fact, that's just generally recognized even by the large corporations who have broken it.
SPEAKER_00The Etcra Group does important work to address the socioeconomic and ecological issues surrounding new technologies that can have important impacts on the world's poorest and most vulnerable people. That includes doing technological assessments on new technologies that are being proposed to be implemented around the world, monitoring global governance issues, including on corporate concentration and trade in technologies. And of course, they work closely and partner with civil society groups and social movements, especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. I was really happy to talk with Jim because first of all, I think that the food system and what is happening in the food system is incredibly important. And certainly it's a conversation that, you know, we've been having more and more lately that is coming up in the media, especially as we've seen the impacts of the pandemic, supply chain disruptions, the war on the food system, and certainly food prices and what that is meant for people to be able to feed themselves. But at the same time, October 16th, you know, in the next few days, as this episode comes out, is World Food Day, which is an important time to think about the food system that we depend on, how we get our food, and whether it is the best way to structure that food production for sustainability, for equity, and to ensure it's not at risk as these kind of structural crises that we can face might become more common with the climate crisis. So in this conversation, Jim and I talk a lot about the way that tech companies and big agriculture companies are pushing new technologies into the industrial food system, what that actually means for food production, for food workers, what it means for the control of these major companies over the system and increasing consolidation that's occurring within that system. There are a lot of reasons to be very worried about the direction that the food system is going in and really has been going in for a long time. And so we discussed that in this conversation, including the ways that big tech companies and the Gates Foundation are helping to push these ideas of how the food system should work onto the rest of us. So it's a very important conversation. I'll include a link to the full report that we discuss in the show notes if you wanted to check it out yourself or go look up various details of what we actually talk about in the conversation. But at its core, we really need to question whether what we're being sold with these technologies and with the capitalist development of the food system is really the best way to be producing food and whether it's delivering on the many promises that it loves to make to us about how it's making things better. In this case, we're talking about food, but I think that what we're talking about can be seen in so many other sectors when we talk about the implementation of new digital technologies and the consequences that come with that. If you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share it on social media or anyone who you think would learn from this conversation. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week so I can have these really important conversations on the food system and technology and, you know, many of the other topics that we discuss on the show, you can join supporters like Rachel from St. Louis and Philip in the greater Philadelphia area by going to patreon.com/slash tech won't save us and becoming a supporter. Thanks for listening and enjoy this week's conversation. Jim, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you. It's lovely to be here. I'm really excited to chat with you. You know, ETC Group, which you're the research director of, has this new report out on the food barons, right? In the food system. And a big piece of that is the way that digital technologies and other technologies are being used in the food system and the impact of that. And so there's plenty that we can dig into. I'm really looking forward to it. But I want to start with a couple broader questions, and then we can start to dig into those specifics. Okay. And so in the past few years, there have been numerous disruptions to the food system from the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain issues, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, and now rising inflation. How has this affected the food system? And what has it meant for people's ability to feed themselves?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's really important. So, as you mentioned, there is, you know, particularly right now, a food price crisis where uh hunger is skyrocketing. And unfortunately, that's been happening not just since the Ukraine war. It was actually, you know, it's really begun to spike around the end of 2019 with the pandemic. You know, in 2020, I think one in ten people were going to bed hungry around the world and in many parts of the world, much higher than that. But that hunger, while it's been exacerbated by some of the what you mentioned there, it has long roots. We have a food system that is broken in so many ways. And in fact, that's just generally recognized, even by the large corporations who have broken it, that we have a food system where not only do you have rising hunger, not only do you have this system driving climate change, I think somewhere between a third to half of all emissions are from the food system and causing biodiversity loss. And there's also massive violence and harm to workers. There's so many ways in which the food system has been completely broken. And truthfully, what we actually have is not one food system. We have two food systems. We have the ways in which people have always fed themselves, which is particularly small farmers, peasants, small producers, producing food on the land, sharing it within their territories and so forth, and these kind of webs of provision. And now for a hundred years, we've had the growth of what's called the industrial food chain. And that food chain model, which extracts value, extracts calories from the soil, extracts labor from people, and destroys as it goes, is now way beyond breaking point. And it's harming not just the environment and our health, but our people's ability to live and justice. So, you know, we have a system that is not just breaking under its own weight, it is breaking people, the land, the environment, and our democracy. It's a pretty grim picture.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it is a it is a grim picture. But, you know, I appreciate you laying it out for us because we need to understand these things. We need to understand what's going on in the food system if we're ever going to hope to rectify it and to build something better. You know, you talked about the two systems that exist there, right? Are there any other major misconceptions that you think people have about the way that the food system works today that are important to bring up to set up our conversation?
SPEAKER_01Sure, yeah. It talks about that sort of hundred-year arc of the industrial food system coming together. And in that hundred years, especially in places in the global north, in more urban environments, I think we've become very inculcated with the idea that the food system is the industrial food system and that it is these food chains where you know food is a commodity that's brought from the soil to traders, to processors, and to grocery stores, and and the food chain is presented as the way in which we get food. It's just simply not true for most people on this planet. 70% of people around the world eat off of these local food webs. They they grow their own food or they grow with their neighbors, they they hunt, they fish, they share within their community, they share seeds. That's actually the way most people are fed, and it actually feeds people. So it's really important to recognize that that is the system that actually feeds people and works and always has done, but is being destroyed. And then, you know, we will hear often that what's needed is more food. If people are hungry, it's because there's not enough food. And that's again simply not true. There's more than enough food, particularly in these local food webs. The reason people are going hungry right now is a food price crisis. It's that the people can't afford food, they can't access food for political reasons, they can't access food because society is broken in all kinds of ways. And usually it's about human rights. So anytime we're told that a tech is going to improve food production or that what we need is up production, that's entirely the wrong set of answers. But it suits the agribusiness corporations, now the tech corporations. So I think that's a very important thing to keep in mind.
SPEAKER_00It's so fascinating, right? Because it just makes me think of how these tech solutions are presented in so many more areas as well, where it's not really dealing with the root of the problem, the political problem, but saying, let's put in this technology and it will address something that we perceive to be the problem, but then doesn't actually solve even what it claims the problem to be, you know?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, or or that we choose to present as the problem. Because, you know, globally we have movements for food sovereignty and food justice where billions of peasants, farmers, activists know perfectly well what the problem is. The problem is the power of large corporations, the that need to have access to land, the need to have their human rights defended. That's the thing that makes sure people can eat and uh do so in a way that supports the planet. But that's not a story that the food barons, we're going to talk about in a moment, uh, that's not the story they want to tell. They want to say that these are that hunger is a technical problem that they're working on.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I think that's really well put. So as you said there, you know, this report is about the food barons. And I think before we start to dig into the details of the report, it's important for us to know who those food barons are and how they operate within this industrial food system. So who are these companies?
SPEAKER_01Et cetera group have been tracking who are the largest players in all different sectors of food for about 35 years now. And we look at, you know, what are the largest companies in seeds, what are the largest companies in pesticides, what are the largest companies in trading and so forth. And um what we've seen through that time is an amazing consolidation that, you know, in areas such as seeds, for example, 25, 30 years ago, that there were um 10 companies that controlled 40% of the seed market, that's already pretty terrible. Now there's two companies that control 40% of the seed market, and there's basically four companies that control pretty much all the market, really. And as you go across every single sector of the so-called food chain, these links by which food is now commercially brought from seed to stomach, you see at each stage that there are a handful of companies that really control that. It's very clear amongst the input companies, seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, genetic traits, things like that. It's also really clear among the traders. It's really becoming clear actually among even grocery stores and food manufacturers and so forth. And increasingly we can say that the food chain, this construct that agribusiness has created in order to extract value continuously from food, is now being controlled by a smaller and smaller number of very powerful corporations. You know, I did some calculations this week where it looked like the top hundred food and agriculture-related companies, the money that they bring in off the food chain is equivalent to all the money that all the farmers, fisher folk, pastoralists, growers around the world bring in. It's almost exactly the same, actually, about $3.6 billion. And that's just 100 companies. These companies are now literally controlling the direction, just this small number, of this industrial food system. That's the food system that feeds us, that's the food system that transforms our planet. It's the food system that supposedly is responsible for our health and so forth. So it's very serious.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and it's very concerning, right? And certainly we've seen this kind of increasing consolidation, not just in the food system, but throughout the broader economy now for decades, as you say, you know, you've been following this for quite a while at the et cetera group. So what are the consequences of the degree to which this system is concentrated? You know, what risks does that put into the system? And also, the report is very much about technologies. How does the rollout of new technologies and the need to invest in these new digital technologies increase the pressure for further consolidation?
SPEAKER_01Those are both very big topics. So the first question about you know, what does this mean to have a massively consolidated food system, or at least industrial food system? So again, I point out is this is what only feeds 30% of the planet, even though it uses up 70% of the resources. It means that you have a small number of players who can determine and control markets. And so right now we're seeing, you know, prices go through the roof and people are really hurting because they can't afford food. And some part of that, maybe a large part of that, is because you have these small number of companies who can control the prices, frankly, and engage in a form of price fixing and pushing up the prices and speculation. Suddenly it hands tremendous political control to these agribusiness food companies. When a hundred companies have the same economic weight as every single farmer, grower, and producer in the world, then those hundred companies get to call the shots, and even more so on a local, regional, national level. So at the time when food systems are completely broken and we need to be talking about a very different food system, they have the ear of the government because they have the money. Simple as that. So, you know, it's very perverting of any kind of fair decision making. And, you know, what we know is that the way in which these companies have become powerful is through deeply damaging and harmful practices, socially damaging, environmentally damaging, and damaging to justice. And they are going to dig deeper into those directions. They're not changing, they're going deeper into that, often with technological means. Your second question was how does technology interact with this? In every way, actually. Agriculture and food is deeply intertwined with technology. You know, it is it's the technologies of agriculture that enable food to come to us, you know, whether it's the tractors or the hose or the breeding of seeds or pesticides or fertilizers or right through to cooking in the kitchen and you know, all of this technology all the way through. And these companies have known this for years. That's you know, they are technology companies. They're hybrid seed companies, they're fertilizer companies, they're they've been on the cutting edge of technological transformations in order to increase their power and allied that with technologically driven market strategies. And right now, they're doing that again, and they're doing it with a sort of breadth and transformational power that we really haven't seen in the food system maybe in a hundred years. You know, what was incredible in writing this report was to see, you know, the hundreds of food companies that we looked at their annual reports and, you know, what they're boasting about, every single one of them, almost to a T, is saying we are now employing digital technology to remake the food system in our particular corner, whether it's in the farming on the field, in the breeding on the seeds, and the how we deliver it to consumers, how we how we do the logistics, whatever point of the food chain you look at, it's being pulled apart and remade around digital and biotechnological tools in order to deepen their power and their grip over the food chain, in order to deepen their potential to extract value. That's a transformation that I think many people aren't even really aware of. We're used to seeing it in other parts of media and so forth, where technology has been brought in. But uh, the way it's happening to the very stuff we we live on that shapes our health and our societies, I think is hidden to most people.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I think it's a really good point, right? Because, you know, I think that there's been a growing discussion of the way that digital technology is kind of, you know, escaping the internet, escaping the computer and our mobile phones and moving out into the physical world over the past decade or so, you know, increasingly that there's a push for our homes to be filled with smart gadgets and, you know, our cities to be filled with smart sensors, but we don't think about how that extends now to the farm, the food system, and what that actually looks like and the implications of it. And part of the reason I asked about how technology is also helping drive this consolidation is because it seems to me, as I look at the impact of technology in other areas, that as companies, traditional companies who operate in these spaces, have to invest in digital technologies and keep up with what these major kind of tech firms who are very highly valued, have easy access to capital are doing, that they end up having to consolidate in order to pay to kind of develop these technologies or roll out these technologies because of what the tech economy is doing.
SPEAKER_01That is true here. In 2013, what was then Monsanto is now Bayer, the world's largest seed company and one of the world's largest agrochemical companies, paid a billion dollars for a data company called the Climate Corporation. And at the time, people were scratching their heads. You know, why have they just spent a billion dollars on this tiny startup? And it was because the climate corporation had large amounts of weather and other environmental data that they needed. And it was the first step actually in trying to defend themselves against what they saw coming, which was the big data firms, whether that's Microsoft or Alibaba or Google and so forth, were going to step into the space and they needed to become tech companies themselves. They needed to become data companies. And at the time, the chief technology officer of Monsanto, uh Rob Fraley, said, you know, in five years' time, five, ten years' time, I could see us being more of an information technology company than a seed company. And sure enough, that's exactly what's happened. They have transformed themselves, and they all have, not just Monsanto Bayer, but all of them, into being able to deal with and profit off large-scale extraction of data and connect that to strategies around automation, around carbon credits and all sorts of things. You know, you have people in Bayer Monsanto now saying that they more sell information than chemicals. That's not true. They still sell much of the world's chemicals. They're like the second largest chemical company in the world. But the fact that they see themselves that way, that they've had to turn themselves into these giant data companies in order to kind of be able to both partner with and defend against what was bound to happen, which was that the real big data giants were gonna move into food because it's a fifth of the global economy. And of course, that's where they want to be.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, of course. You know, just as they move into every other sector of society, they're gonna come here too. You know, it makes perfect sense. And I was wondering why I hadn't heard the name Monsanto in a while. Of course, they changed the name. So in the report, you write, or you know, the authors of the report write that every sector of the industrial food chain is in the process of transforming into a digital enterprise, as you've been explaining for us. You know, before we dig into the specifics of that, how does a typical industrial farm or food operation operate now? And how do these companies want to see that change in the future?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so it's interesting when you say typical food operation, of course, there's different types of food operations, you know, whether it's livestock or grain and whether it's in North America or whether it's in Latin America. But, you know, actually one of the things about the industrial food chain is the attempt to standardize and to try and push one model and with a sort of technological package, push that everywhere. So, you know, a typical grain or um row crop operation in North America, let's say, you know, does have the large amount of investment in machinery, in tractors and combines and so forth, a large amount of investment in pesticides and uh agrochemicals. It's buying seeds every year and it's buying the specific seeds that are sold to them for their area by the companies who they have to pay every year for new seeds and fertilizer, of course. These are systems that are about trying to extract calories from the soil, really, and having extracted calories and soil, you need to put it back in again because it's not working in a in a circular way as it should do. There's a typical North American arable operation. In the case of production agriculture, what the data companies and the agribusiness companies are saying is we will sell you additionally artificial intelligence generated prescriptions on how you can farm. If you give us all the data that comes off of your farm, and tractors, for example, from John Deere, are now tricked out with sensors. They're picking up, like in the same way an iPhone is picking up data in all kinds of ways, a tractor is like that. It's it's picking up data from the soil, it's picking up temperature, it's picking up weather, it's picking up where seeds are put and so forth. It's combining that with other environmental data and planting data, and then all of that is being sent back to machine learning agents who are rubbing it together with all the data streaming off of other farms and then generating these prescriptions. They're saying through platforms that the companies have, like Climate Fieldview, which is the one that Bayer Monsanto has, for example, or John Deere's Operations Center, they're saying if you do this in exactly this way, you will get this outcome. It's called outcome-based uh approaches. And for example, Bayer Monsanto say that there are 40 different points along the growing cycle where they can use machine learning to tell the farmer how to do it precisely, and that that will lead to certain outcomes. And they'll even promise that if you follow their prescriptions, which of course includes buying their products, that they will guarantee you an outcome at market, or they will guarantee you a carbon credit or something like that. And that if they don't, they'll split the difference with you. Or if you do better, you'll split the difference with them. And in this way, they're tying the farmer into long agreements, which is the sort of thing agribusiness longs to do. So, you know, agribusiness says, you do what we tell you exactly. We'll take all of your data coming off of your farm, which of course they will use in all sorts of other ways, and we will have these agreements over you for several years in exchange for you know what's seen to be a sort of guaranteed outcome, which farmers. You know, particularly industrial farmers are interested in because there's so much risk in farming. And that, of course, is it comes along with another set of packages which are about drones coming into agriculture, agricultural robots coming into agriculture, self-driving or self-steering tractors coming into agriculture. So that increasingly there's this promise made to the farmer that you won't need labor. You could even just sort of sit back, drink your coffee, look at your iPad, let the machine intelligence decide how your farm runs.
SPEAKER_00It's an interesting picture of what these farms could look like. I guess based on that, these are some of the things that I wanted to talk about. The reliance on data, the increased kind of push to automate the farm and what happens on the farm. What does this desire to collect more data about what happens on the farm, about you know how this whole process works? What does that mean for farming, for the food system? But what does it also mean for the farmer and how they approach growing this food, making this food?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean it has many implications. You know, one thing when I when you asked me to describe what's on the farm, one thing I forgot to mention that's essential are farm workers. Farming systems still require farm workers. Largely it's migrant laborers who have very little rights and who have been treated honestly as machines for years. And it becomes very easy to increasingly replace them with machines. That's been the way it's been. And to change these landscapes, the farm landscapes are work for machines rather than for people. What you're doing is you're increasingly taking people out of the system. We've been talking with people through the food system and with allies and farm workers and small farmers and so forth. And the sort of concerns that they come up with are all about sovereignty and control over their own decision making. They either feel that this will entirely put them under the control of large agribusiness corporations, which has been going on for a while, but now it's going to be, you know, very directly algorithmically controlled, just as workers in Amazon warehouses are algorithmically controlled or delivery drivers are algorithmically controlled, the farmer becomes algorithmically controlled. And that in a bigger sense, they feel they have no choice. You know, having been pushed into this productivist idea that you have to produce and sell to what are actually very few grain traders, if they don't invest and become quite indebted with the next set of kit and they don't go this way, they're just going to be cast aside. The bigger the farms get, the more kit they have, those are the ones who are going to survive. And otherwise everything else is going to be consolidated. So this almost feels inevitable. And then, you know, for farm workers, as I mentioned, what's happening right now, the wholesale redesigning of the farm landscape to take them out and make the landscape work for robots, make the landscape work for self-driving, automated, AI-driven machines, just feels catastrophic. Two years ago, these uh farm workers were being told that they were essential at the beginning of the pandemic. And now they're being literally designed out of the system. And they have the deep knowledge, the sort of fine-grained knowledge in how to grow food. And it's being cast aside for AI prescriptions. And then, of course, you know, there is a lot of suspicion, and rightly so, about where is this massive amount of data being taken off of people's farms going? What's it being used for? How's it being leveraged against farmers? We had an example a couple of years ago where it turned out Bayer Monsanto, who had an agreement with Trimble, which is sort of uh Airbnb for land, were seemed to be sharing data with Trimble, and then suddenly farmers were being contacted by landowners to push up their rents based on all the data that showed them what the value of the land was. And that's just a touch of the sort of the ways in which this will be used against farmers, food workers, and so forth.
SPEAKER_00There are a few things I want to pick up on from that answer. It's fascinating to hear that, like how it works, the implications of what it's all going to look like, right? Obviously, I'm sure there are people at the agro companies, there are people in the tech companies who would say, no, but you know, we are adopting these robots that can do this work, and then that ensures that people don't need to do this like hard backbreaking labor. What's wrong with that narrative?
SPEAKER_01So I think you know, the narrative that agricultural work is hard, backbreaking, something what people want to get out of, doesn't fit with my experience of talking with farmers and farm workers. People like being close to the land, they're proud to produce food that feeds people. You know, there is something very meaningful in that, and that work can be very meaningful. But it can only be meaningful if they have agency and respect and human rights. One of the things, there's some excellent work that's been done by a scholar called Semir Doshi, where he's talked with farm workers about digitalization on the farm, and he's looked at the way in which there's a racial bias is being exacerbated here. So just as we know that there's uh racial bias coded into AI systems when they're about media or management and so forth, that's obviously true when it's about farming, and it's almost doubly true. On the one hand, you've got not just racial bias, but other biases of people who do not understand the reality of the farm system, who are programming and building these systems, who are building them in ways that exclude and push out and override the interests and needs of farm workers, most of whom are migrant. And secondly, they're building them for the owners. And I think it's something like 80 to 90 percent of farm owners and certainly in the US are white. So, you know, once again, these are being built for owners who have all sorts of systems of racism and biases built in by people who also have their own systems of bias. And that's going to inevitably drive through as you mechanize food systems. I mean, that's nothing new. This has been true. The food system has been built on technologies that disempower and override the rights of marginalized people from the very beginning, including the cotton gin and just the history of industrial agriculture. And this is the next phase of it.
SPEAKER_00I think it's such a good point, right? Because when we talk about technology, we often think that it develops in one way, right? There's only one way that technology can go, and we're just waiting for it to kind of take its next step, right? When in fact, you know, technology can be developed in many different ways. And right now, the way that technology is being developed is in the interests of, you know, these capitalist agribusiness companies and the owners of these increasingly consolidated farms in many cases who are able to afford to, you know, implement these technologies. However, if you had a different food system where power was distributed in a different way and decisions about how technologies could be implemented and developed were made by, you know, people like the marginalized farm workers that you're talking about, it would probably look quite different. And the types of technologies that would be developed and implemented would also be quite different, I imagine.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think that's true. And there is a movement that's trying that. I mean, to me, one of the most insightful comments about technology came from Winston Churchill, of all people, who said, you know, we make our buildings and then our buildings make us. But what he didn't say, which he should have said, is we don't make our buildings, or most people don't. It's the powerful who make the buildings. They make the technologies, corporations make the technologies, but those technologies in turn then make us and then they shape us. And that's what's happening right now. And it goes back to the food barons. If if this small group of extremely powerful players are making the technologies, which in turn will shape us and how we eat, and in fact, you know, nudge us and all sorts of things, that's an extreme exercise of power. So there are movements that are trying to very, very, very small, push against that, saying, you know, can we develop tools, including digital tools, that are led by small farmers who care about food sovereignty? Can we develop tools where the work is done by by farm workers? Those kind of farm hack movements are just coming into place. They're very interesting.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and and I think that we'll come back to that, right? Because and and I appreciate you outlining that, because I think it's such an important point. And I, you know, obviously I completely agree with you. But going back to what you were saying about the implications of these technologies rolling out and what they mean for these farms, you were talking about how these companies want to lock these farmers into long contracts and kind of how this pushes increased consolidation on the farm because you have to invest to be able to implement these systems in order to kind of keep up with, you know, everything that's coming out to remain competitive in the industry. And what it made me think of is kind of a continuation of a trend that already existed, right? You know, companies like Monsanto pushing seeds and pesticides and kind of locking the farms into these contracts as they have these kind of genetically modified seeds. And if they get onto the farm, then all of a sudden you get locked into this whole system. So to me, it feels like, and I'm sure you would agree, that it's a continuation of things that have already been happening with technologies, because these seeds and pesticides are technologies, and now it's kind of the next stage of this.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, absolutely. And you know, this is how agribusiness and the industrial food chain has worked over the last hundred years. They created an entirely new sector, which is inputs. That's something that agro-ecological farmers, most farmers, don't even have. It doesn't exist. They created that sector and then they locked farmers into having to use those inputs. As you say, genetically modified seeds are one of the latest versions of this. Now there's a new input, it's data. And it's not data, it's artificial intelligence. And they're making that an essential part of being an industrial farmer. So yeah, that's that's definitely part of it.
SPEAKER_00Is there any indication yet that you know using all of this data and these AI tools actually does improve the farming, improve outputs, productivity, all these sorts of things?
SPEAKER_01What you're pointing to there is it's important to look at what the actual claims they're making are. Because, of course, this is this is accompanied not just by productivist claims that this is going to make more food, which has always been the claim of agribusiness, but other claims that this is going to make more efficient systems, systems that are better for the environment, that use less energy, that sequester more carbon in the soil, which is very important right now. And as you say, that there's going to be less back-breaking labor. These are the kind of claims that are being made. And they really have to be interrogated carefully. So to give one example, one of the big claims for Precision Agriculture Ag 4.0, which is one of the terms for this, is that there will be less pesticides because the algorithms will tell you exact and do tell you exactly where to spray the right thing at the right place, at the right time, so that you don't have to have this sort of broad spraying of pesticide. And that will reduce pesticide use. Well, of course, first of all, it locks in pesticide use. You know, it actually means that you have to use pesticides, which is anathema to those who don't use chemicals and the sort of agroecological approach. But in fact, when you sort of look at what the companies are saying more privately, they're saying overall they can still sell as much pesticides. But it's just that it's used more specifically in the right place on the farm. And so, you know, in that sense, they're they're getting a double whammy. On the one hand, they're continuing to sell and lock farmers into the use of these pesticides. And secondly, they're selling them all of the services and getting back a tremendous amount of data that they'll sell to other people or use to find new markets. So there's no proof that there's a real reduction overall in pesticides, but they're claiming that maybe there'll be an increase in yield. So we go back to these productivist things. Probably the big claim that's being made about these um precision agriculture uh platforms is that the farmers, if they sign up for these, will be able to get carbon credits. Um, so if you follow exactly the prescriptions that Bio Monsanto or John Deere give you, they will be able to assure you that you have put more carbon into the soil. And in return, they will broker with the financial markets that you will get a carbon credit. Of course, you with the farmer won't get much of that, but you will get some sort of carbon farming payment, and they'll get part of it too. And so they therefore are placing themselves, these agribusiness firms, as a major broker of carbon credits in the carbon market at a time when the carbon market is desperately trying to find new places to bury carbon because there's nothing left in the forests and they can't get into the oceans. And I can talk more about that. Whether you have actually sequestered more carbon is questionable. Soil science is now beginning to say that these kind of industrial ways of trying to use industrial farming techniques to put more carbon in the soil probably aren't working. But behind that, and this is really significant, is a massive amount of energy because all of this is data, and data is energy. And the sort of energy you require to run these systems is immense. This is the very biggest kind of data, agricultural data, weather data, soil data, and it's continual. So, you know, I did some calculations where I looked at what it would take to just get the data from the US corn crop, which is kind of what they're doing, and get it to the servers of Amazon and so forth, where it goes. And it's about the equivalent of the electricity use of Senegal. But that doesn't include the AI computation. It doesn't include trying to run 5G and edge computing to get it there. At a time when data is going to be about a fifth of electricity use, probably more, the big data coming off of farms and the food system is going to be a huge chunk of that. And so to then claim that this is some kind of climate benefit is completely facetious.
SPEAKER_00It's just wild to hear that, to think about the implications of it. And certainly, you know, listeners of the show will be familiar. We've talked about carbon credits and things like that, the issues with those, you know, and then we've certainly also talked about cloud computing and the real footprint of that, the energy footprint of it, and how it's so often kind of left out of all these discussions as the desire to collect data on more and more places is expanded continually, right? And we don't think about where all that data goes, the energy that's required to collect it, to store it, to process it, all these sorts of things. I think it's a really important point. A few more quick questions on these technologies on the farm, and then I want to talk about some bigger issues before we wrap up. You know, we talked about the pesticide use, the GMO seeds that were pushed by these companies. In the report, you also talk about gene editing and how this is kind of the next stage of this. Can you talk to us a bit about that and what the implications of it are?
SPEAKER_01Sure. Gene editing is where you're redesigning the DNA of an organism by taking and removing single base pairs of DNA. So it's it's a sort of a next step along the genetic engineering path. And it's alongside a whole set of other techniques called synthetic biology as well. So there's actually a broader area there. The relevance of this to data is well at least twofold. One is that whole area of genetic engineering and synthetic biology and digital breeding is a data enterprise. You are now designing seeds and breeds and so forth using machine learning, and they're coming up with the designs, and then you know, robotic genetic engineering systems are trying to implement it. And they're doing tens of thousands of different genetic changes every day to come up with them. This is what the industry calls biodigital development, this idea that increasingly digital tools are being applied to and hard to disentangle from biotech and biological change. And it's really clear there where you're using digital tools to design new organisms and then putting them out. But actually, in some ways, the whole food system is becoming a biodigital system. When you're taking data off of the farm, which you know, which are ecosystems, and then you're using a machine learning to reshape those ecosystems, that is also a biodigital transformation of the living world. And at the other end, it's happening to consumers as well. The nudging of consumers using data is also a biodigital transformation. So actually, the system is having this biodigital transformation. For on the farm, the promise that is held out is that as the companies such as Bio Monsanto or Corteva and so forth have very specific knowledge of your farm and your soil and your weather conditions, they will offer you very specific biotechnological interventions. It will be this kind of RNAI spray or this specifically engineered seed. And of course, by claiming they can tailor it to your specific situation, they can charge you more, of course. And as they have control over at the moment 87 and a half billion data points coming off of 118 million acres, that gives them a sort of vast lab with which to experiment with all of this. So there's a very close link between using all the data and these prescriptions that are being sent out and then trying to push these different biodigital interventions. And you'll see more and more of the biodigital interventions being pushed on the farm.
SPEAKER_00It's kind of terrifying, right? Especially if you think about, you know, what if they get these interventions wrong?
SPEAKER_01They will. One of the things I actually find most terrifying is we know that machine learning systems, you know, because they're a sort of black box where we don't fully understand how they make decisions, will go wrong. Whether they crash an Uber or something else, it's pretty terrible when they crash a self-driving car and somebody gets killed. If they crash a food system, many people get killed. This is literally the stuff that keeps us alive. And so that brings us to, you know, kind of a whole big question. If our food system is digitized, it's it's run by machine learning algorithms that we don't understand how they're making decisions, and probably they're doing it actually, they're skewed for commercial reasons. Then what happens when they get it wrong, or they go wrong, or there's an outage and all of this kind of stuff? You know, there's a tremendous vulnerability being put into our commercial food systems.
SPEAKER_00Just a final piece on that, I think connected to it. You know, in recent years, there's been a big push to embrace lab grown meat and the idea that this is going to solve a lot of the problems with the livestock aspect of industrial farming or industrial livestock production. What do you think of that? Will that ultimately make a big difference or are we being sold a bit of a fantasy here?
SPEAKER_01It's not even a fantasy, it's just another business plan. You know, the story is that when we looked in this report at the meat and protein sector. So the meat sector is reinventing itself as a protein sector. And they're interested in uh selling all kinds of protein. You just see it in a molecular form. So they'll sell industrial meat to one person, and they'll sell organic meat to another, and they'll sell tofu to another, and they'll sell the impossible burger to another. These are all just different protein sources as far as they're concerned. The proteins, of course, are being designed using big data. That's exactly the, you know, they're saying that they're going into databases working out protein structures and then designing them. And creating a new niche, creating particular markets that they can then push, and particularly sort of urban markets where they can then uh get new value. But behind that is the same industrial farming systems, you know, something like the impossible burger. First of all, it's made with genetically engineered blood substitutes, which have unknown proteins in them and all sorts of safety questions. But beyond that, you know, what they're doing is just using pretty terrible large-scale industrial processes, making hyper-processed food, and then connecting that with really trying to narrowly psychologically target different populations, urban populations, vegan populations. And that kind of comes to, I think, another end of the food system that's being digitized in a way that I find extremely alarming is the sort of narrow psychological profiling and creation of new markets, such as plant-based foods, and then sort of trying to mobilize people through digital targeting to change their eating behaviors with stories that are very much targeted directly at them. The same way Cambridge Analytica was doing politically, of course, Cambridge Analytica was also working for Coca-Cola and InBev and some of these food companies. It's just beginning to be uncovered. There's a vast amount of work going on by big food companies to try and manipulate hyper nudge, use dark patterns to drive food decisions. So they're not just taking data from consumers and farmers, they're actually nudging and driving as well.
SPEAKER_00It's so wild. Like, I guess obviously it's something that's going on, but it's just not something that you think about, right? I appreciate you outlining it for us, though, because you know, there has been a lot of hype, I think, around these ideas of lab grown meat and things like that. And I noticed recently that beyond meats, uh, share price has plummeted recently, as I think they've struggled to actually grow their market share in a way that they expected. So I want to end with a few kind of bigger picture questions. I think we've talked a lot about what's going on in the global north with these industrial food systems, right? How have these systems been pushing into the global south in recent years? And what role has the Gates Foundation played in pushing some of these ideas about agriculture and industrial agriculture onto other parts of the world?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so the first thing is to say, you know, the industrial food system is global. And of course, even within the South, there's a North within the South, there's a South within the North, in fact. And some of the places where the industrial food giants, the food barons, are most uh strongest, are in middle class, poorer communities in the global south, where they're pushing cheap junk food and at the same time transforming whole agricultural sectors to become uh producers of industrial calories, basically. So places like Brazil, Mexico, and so forth. So the Gates Foundation is deeply, deeply invested in these technologies. It has been on the biotech side for some time, but is now really deeply invested in the digitization of food and agriculture. The Gates Foundation says that they uh want half of the small farmers in the developing world to be on digital platforms within by 2030. That's an explicit aim of theirs. And so, you know, they are working through groups like Agri. Grad, the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa and other platforms to push digital platforms, to push drones, to push automation into these places that previously there's much lower industrial agriculture. And it's about opening up large areas to large-scale industrial agriculture. Obviously, this is not a million miles away from the fact that Microsoft is probably the most aggressive data player in this area. What was really stunning to me as we looked through every sector of the food chain, I originally thought that Amazon would be the big player. And Amazon Web Services is a big player throughout the food chain. Of course, Amazon has its own grocery store, a whole food market, and is becoming probably is going to be very soon the largest grocery retailer in the world. So in that sense, Amazon are important. But it was Microsoft who were making agreements with the Indian government, with Bayer, with the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa. They were making everywhere we looked, Microsoft were making agreements to handle the data coming off of food systems, especially on the farm. So for Microsoft, which is not a million miles away from the Gates Foundation, this is a big part of their strategies going forward. And so it's not even slightly surprising that the Gates Foundation is putting digitalization at the heart of their push for the food system. The Gates Foundation, just recently, having become the major donor of the CGIAR, that's the green revolution centers that hold all the seeds and so forth, turned those into what they call one CGIAR around this idea of big data. So they're they're getting themselves right into the heart of research and development in developing countries. They also pushed for the UN Committee on World Foods, which is the most important body on World Food, to have a brand new report on data in agriculture and food, which just came out and they tried very hard to influence it and is now about to move into a work program on data in agriculture and food. And what they were pushing really heavily, and they're having some success, is saying that, you know, decisions around food and agriculture should be based on all of the data coming off of the self-driving tractors, the drones, and so forth. They want that to be what drives decision making. And our organization and food sovereignty movements are saying, no, we need governance over data. Data is not the thing that feeds people. What feeds people is farmers, it's small farmers, it's peasants, and we need to govern and control data. But the Gates Foundation is in every place trying to push forward digitalization.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, continue to kind of marginalize the human knowledge, the knowledge that's been passed from generation to generation on and how to grow food appropriately and things like that, and instead replace it with these kind of artificial intelligence data collection systems. You mentioned Microsoft there. Are there other major tech companies who are really getting into this space? And is their focus really on kind of the cloud data storage side of things, or are they do they have other kind of ways that they're intervening in this sector too?
SPEAKER_01You know, all the largest cloud companies are getting into this. Um so as I say, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft it's Azure, Amazon Web Services, Alibaba. I'd say those are the three that just come up again and again and again. Google Cloud, IBM, who's got a very major push on food and agriculture. Definitely across those companies, you see particularly they want to be handling the data, they want to be processing it, providing the machine learning that's driving all of these systems. And for us, that was one of the major conclusions that came out of looking at this report. It's not just that traditional big agribusiness firms are turning into tech companies or or into data companies, it's that the data companies are stepping heavily into this area and will become the major players if they haven't already.
SPEAKER_00I think it's really important that we understand that, right? Especially when we think about obviously how food is essential, right? Like we can't survive without it.
SPEAKER_01And and that, you know, there's also uh I know on on the show there's been some discussion about Web 3.0 and blockchain and so forth, and we're seeing also an attempt to put the food chain on the blockchain. All the grain traders, who really are maybe the most powerful people in the food chain, like um Cargill and Kafko and Bunge and Archer Daniels Midland, have all come together around a single blockchain they call Covantis, which runs on Ethereum network. And so, you know, they basically saying that the millions of trades that are done every day and the carrying of all the world's grain will be sorted out through the blockchain. And then you have another big blockchain being put together by Bayer with others called the Trace Harvest Network, again on the Ethereum network, so that from seed to stomach, everything's being managed through those blockchains. So then the economy of Web 3.0 becomes very much entangled with the food chain, which I think is a terrible idea.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, absolutely. And when you said Ag4, I was like, man, the agriculture companies are ahead. They're past Web 3, they're at Ag4 already.
SPEAKER_01So the World Economic Forum uses that term. It's the idea of the fourth industrial revolution, and they therefore talk about Ag 4.0. And what they're talking about, which is what you said earlier, is the way in which data and machine learning and so forth is now moving into physical systems, and those are becoming cyber physical systems. And whether that's manufacturing or the food chain or you know, education, each of these are becoming these entangled cyber physical systems. And that's what's happening to the food chain.
SPEAKER_00I don't know. It's not a great development, in my opinion, but Jim, this has been a really fantastic and enlightening conversation. And I wanted to end with a bigger question, just to see your thoughts on where we go from here, you know. So when we think about this report, what is the big takeaway? What should we learn from this? How do we push back or can we push back on these developments? And what would a better agricultural future look like?
SPEAKER_01That's a nice place to start. So we were involved in producing a report a couple of years ago called the Long Food Movement, where we're looking at over a 30-year period where the agri-food industry expects to go, which was all of this stuff. It was, you know, it's about digitization and so forth, and where the food sovereignty movement with a long-term perspective could be going, or is already going, in fact. And what was nice is, you know, the global food sovereignty movement, which is billions of peasants, food workers and environmentalists and so forth, has a very clear idea of what a good food system looks like, mostly because it's not speculative in the future. It exists. People have been feeding themselves in agro-ecological ways based on territories and cultures. And as I said earlier, 70% of the world is still fed in this way. So these things already exist. It's not, it's not some utopia. It's true and it's now. It's being pushed aside by industrial agriculture, but it's real. And so defending that is actually very exciting because it's it's in place. It's important, therefore, for that movement to be able to really understand how these technologies are going to harm them, how they can uh expose the impacts, and that requires technology assessment, etc. This is for us, this is so strategically important. Movements, whether it's the food movement or or the health justice movement or any other movement, need to be pushing for technology assessment led by people in a participatory way. And that needs to be built into all of our decision making so that it becomes really clear what these technologies are going to do to the world's most marginal people, to our ecosystems and so forth. And what we're finding is that as we're trying to pull together conversations across food movements, and we're running a process called the food, data and justice dialogues, where in different regions and across regions we're learning from each other. Trade unionists are talking with peasants, they're talking with animal rights advocates and so forth to understand what these technologies are doing from their perspective. But that has to happen across sectors. Just as the food sovereignty movement is dealing with this digitalization, as you pointed out, so is the health justice movement, so is the trade justice movement, so is the gender justice movement, so is the climate justice movement. We need to have conversations between all of these movements about how this digital transformation, and I don't like using that word transformation because it's got all these positive meanings that have been given to it by the World Economic Foundation. It's really more like a digital ripping apart, upturning, and disrupting, but disrupting also is made to sound good. These things are happening in parallel in the physical economy and in many places, and we need to be talking across our movements about this. And people who've worked on digital issues around media and so forth have got a jump on this. They see what's going on with this massive change in capitalism. And those of us who have been on the front lines of the fights for food justice and and so forth have got another set of things to bring to that conversation. So I think the linking up of movements to really take on the digital upturning is the number one thing that has to happen right now.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's a great place to lead the conversation. You know, a great place to have people think about, you know, how to push back on this and what a better food system would look like, and also the implications of all of these things that we've been talking about in this conversation. Jim, I thank you so much for taking the time to chat. It's a fantastic report. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01It was a pleasure chatting. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00Jim Thomas is a research director at the Etcetra group. You can follow him on Twitter at at Jimetc, you can follow me at at ParisMarks, and you can follow the show at TechWon't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening.