Smart farming and artificial intelligence in East Africa: Addressing indigeneity, plants, and gender

Abstract

Precision agriculture, including the deployment of robotic farm workers, artificial intelligence (AI) driven equipment, and corresponding “smart” systems, is being enthusiastically lauded for improving crop yields, strengthening food security, generating economic growth, and combating poverty. Techno-optimism has captured the imagination of media, industry, and governments alike. Simultaneously, researchers in the computer science and machine learning spaces have begun cataloguing potential harms that arise from information technologies that are shaped by bias, discrimination, and Western hierarchies of power. While precision agriculture and smart farming technologies may provide some opportunities for East African smallholder women farmers, they may also emerge as a new—yet familiar—system of appropriation and control over their labor and knowledge. Concurrently, there is a need to address how such technologies continue to reinforce plants as mere objects to be optimized and managed, rather than “smart” beings with their own material forces and ways of knowing that shape our worlds. This article considers how precision agriculture and smart farming are potentially managing, surveilling, and optimizing both women farmers and plants in ways that reinforce hierarchies and disregard Indigenous ways of knowing and being. It models a decolonial mode of deliberation toward governing smart farming and related artificially intelligent technologies in more meaningful and inclusive ways.