Modernizing agriculture through digital technologies: prospects and challenges

Abstract

The ability to feed the world’s growing population is at the centre of contemporary discourses on food and agriculture. In particular, the claim that emerging digital technologies, such as precision agriculture, provide the tools to sustainably produce enough food for the growing human population, while addressing environmental problems such as climate change, is being explored by scholars and practitioners alike. Digital technologies, such as sensors, robotics, and Big Data analytics platforms, have taken centre stage in agri-food industries, promising to disrupt the ways we produce, distribute, and consume food. Meanwhile, there exists a relatively limited literature that critically analyses the transformational ability of such technologies to contribute to the future of food, particularly from a global perspective. In this chapter, our aim is to help address this gap in scholarship by critically examining both how digital agriculture may present meaningful opportunities to sustainably feed current and future populations and explore where such claims may be overstated. We will do this by contrasting the potential impact these technologies may have on production systems in both the Global North and South. Specifically, we will describe the on-going technological changes in the South and North and then analyze these impacts on the relationship between digital agriculture technologies and the environment, focusing specifically on climate change, and the consequences of digital technologies and agricultural knowledge production. In this assessment, we argue that there are both varied effects of this so-called ‘digital revolution’ on society and human values, but also some cross-cutting issues that arise from the adoption of new technologies such as challenges with data sovereignty, particularly related to data ownership, management, and privacy. These findings ultimately lead us to conclude that the advent of digital technology in agriculture requires us to refine discourses around sustainable agriculture at its broadest level.