Miguel Afonso Caetano"Digital tools in farming are a big business, with the market worth about $30 billion last year and forecast to nearly triple to $84 billion by 2034. Tech companies including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, and Alibaba all have AI programs to tap this growing market.
Yet there is a risk that AI becomes a new form of digital colonialism, experts have warned, with big tech firms extracting data from poor communities to train a proprietary model and then selling a service or product back to them. Tech companies are already working with large agriculture firms to influence what crops are grown and how, according to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, a think tank. Focusing on only the most productive and profitable crops — corn, rice, wheat, soybeans, and potatoes — can wreck local food systems and hurt farmers, it said.
This is what organizations must guard against, Gandhi said. If AI optimizes only for short-term yields and ignores larger issues such as water depletion, soil degradation, or energy use, it can erode long-term resilience.
“An AI system can perform technically well and still fail farmers if it ignores economic and ecological realities,” he said. “The real measure of AI in agriculture is whether it strengthens farmer agency, improves profitability, supports sustainability, and works for women and men. That depends entirely on building with farmers, not just for them.”"
