Implications of AI and Digitalization for African Food and Agriculture (workshop November 2023)

Digitalization of the food system is a growing issue of concern across Africa. Digitalization of agriculture has been portrayed by governments and agribusiness as a driving force accelerating a particular vision of agricultural transformation. They claim that it will help in meeting sustainable development goals of ending poverty and hunger and addressing climate change. In Africa, our food systems have been no exception to this digital shift and hype; growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, consuming and distributing of food are all becoming subject to digital technologies. At the same time this shift hands power over our food systems to big data giants, increases automation at a cost to farmer and food worker sovereignty and remakes our farm lands and food markets to better serve big data giants rather than human needs.

This session featured ETC's Kavya Chowdry and Barbara Ntambirweki, presenting an introduction to what digitalization is and why we understand this is a process of technological shift that is corporate owned, where data ownership is a key element, as well as the capacity to turn this data in the use of automatic decision making (AI) based on corporate interests, with examples on how this process is being deployed in Africa.