About the project:
"Digital technologies in global agrifood systems: Who wins, who loses, and who decides?"
Amidst growing consensus that global agrifood systems are contributing to both climate change and worsening health outcomes, pathways to reform remain deeply contested. Science, technology and innovation (STI)—including advances related to digital technologies such as artificial intelligence—have increasingly been promoted as potential solutions. For instance, the European Commission’s Twin Transition policy agenda seeks to simultaneously advance both sustainability and digitalization, highlighting agriculture as a key intervention target. The Twin Transition forms part of a relatively novel paradigm of ‘transformative’ policy initiatives that aim to directly address societal challenges, breaking from the previously dominant policy paradigms emphasising STI primarily for growth or national competitiveness.
The view that digital technologies can and should be used to reform global agrifood systems extends well beyond policy circles and has been widely adopted by a range of new actors entering the arena including Big Tech firms and ‘Agriculture 4.0’ or ‘Food 4.0’ startups. Despite these changes, some of the most vocal proponents of these technologies are the global agrifood incumbents that rose to power in recent decades following waves of consolidation across key industries including agricultural inputs (e.g., seeds), agricultural machinery, commodity processing, packaging, distribution and retail.
The continued, dominant presence of these incumbents in the face of a rapidly evolving technological landscape has not been lost on scholars and civil society actors who have long raised concerns about the role of corporate power in shaping agrifood market dynamics, innovation pathways, and policy agendas. Critics of corporate power in agrifood systems generally do not oppose the use of digital technologies as such, but rather argue that when developed and deployed within the existing sociotechnical regime, these technologies risk accelerating a radical bifurcation of agrifood labour markets, ushering in new forms of corporate surveillance, and further entrenching harmful and unjust technological trajectories.
Against this polarized backdrop, this thesis set out to explore the following research question: Who wins, who loses, and who decides when it comes to developing and implementing digital technologies in global agrifood systems? Through the theoretical lens of intellectual monopoly capitalism, this thesis explores the evolving relationship between digitalization and corporate power in global agrifood systems. The results of this research can help to ensure that the transformative paradigm of STI policy is, in fact, transformative.
Thesis supervisors:
Ana Delgado, Associate Professor at TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo
Allan Dahl Andersen, Researcher at TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo and Associate Professor at the Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen
Commentators:
Cecilia Rikap, Associate Professor at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, University College London
Fulvio Castellacci, Professor at TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo
About Chantale Tippett:
Chantale Tippett is a Doctoral Research Fellow at TIK Center for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo. Her research explores the role that digital technologies such as artificial intelligence are playing in transforming agri-food systems. Her work cuts across innovation studies, science and technology studies, and sustainability transitions.
How to participate:
The seminar is open to everyone. Welcome!
Meeting ID: 684 2457 6010
Passcode: 038614
The manuscript is available upon request. Please send the request to Lara Kristiansen lbkristi@uio.no.