Between July 1 and 3, 2026, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) opened the doors of its headquarters in Rome for the first Global Conference on Smart Agriculture. Its theme was “Driving Sustainable Agrifood Systems with Data and Technology.” However, over the three days of the conference, little was said about building food sovereignty or the technologies developed by peoples themselves to advance agroecology. Representatives of governments, research institutions, banks, and corporations paraded through the event. The voices of peasants, women farmers, and traditional peoples and communities were barely heard.
In this article, we examine how the digitalization of agriculture goes hand in hand with the growing reach of Big Tech into rural territories, and how corporations use purplewashing to promote these technologies as if they were a miracle solution to women’s excessive workload. We also outline some elements of an agenda of struggle and proposals to confront this process.
Why Capital Needs Agriculture to Go Digital
The digitalization of agriculture, like that of many other sectors of the economy, is a necessity for capitalism at this particular moment in its history. To continue expanding their power, Big Tech companies need to extend their reach. They need new data, beyond what they have already captured to build their current models, and they need to move into new territories and markets, including rural areas.
Agriculture is the perfect frontier for exploitation. It is vast, with enormous amounts of data on soils, seeds, climate, water, and labor that have yet to be collected. There is still no regulation in place to curb this process, which corporations see as an opportunity.
Agriculture 4.0 relies on new technologies such as satellites, sensors, and drones that map our soils; technical assistance apps that record a wide range of production data; and digital genetic sequencing that increases control over seeds. Social movements denounce these technologies for fueling biopiracy and turning farmers into “digital sharecroppers” who work the land but are controlled by platforms that tell them how to do it. People produce the data but have no sovereignty over it. They are then forced to pay for the knowledge they helped build through subscriptions to digital agriculture platforms.
The FAO Legitimizes the Digitalization of Agriculture
What happened at the FAO’s Global Conference on Smart Agriculture marked the beginning of an effort to build legitimacy for this expansion within multilateral forums. This is taking place in the context of a crisis of multilateralism itself. The CEO of Palantir, a company that has supplied software to the World Food Programme (WFP) since 2019 and is a central player in the US military-industrial complex, publicly declares that multilateral institutions have failed and that the hope lies in making the United States “dominate.” The same company operates within the UN humanitarian system under contracts whose terms have never been disclosed. When social movements raised this issue at FAO forums, they were met with silence.
Part of the crisis of multilateralism as we know it has to do with a funding crisis. Today, the money is in the hands of the private sector and major philanthropic organizations. As a result, resources and institutional energy that should support the FAO’s normative role of guiding states and safeguarding rights are diverted toward showcase events that promote corporate solutions. The conference was a showcase of miraculous “quick fixes,” praise for startups, and techno-solutionism, with no room for participation or dissenting views.
All of this runs counter to the recommendations developed with city society participation in the Committee on World Food Security, one of the few spaces where movements have a voice. Rather than taking into account the movements’ recommendations for building food sovereignty, these institutions merely appropriate our language and try to sell their solutions, supposedly in the name of improving the lives of women, young people, and small-scale farmers.
False Promises About Women’s Time and Labor
Across these spaces, we are told that one of the “wonders” of digital agriculture is that it will reduce the time women spend working in agriculture and give them more free time. We need only look at history to see that this is a false promise. In general, when a technology tied to transnational corporations enters a territory, it causes unemployment and drives people off the land. The work of sustaining life is not eased, while wage labor is eliminated, pushing more and more people into poverty. Wherever agriculture has become dependent on capital and machinery, women have been pushed out.
This is a crucial issue that the feminist economy helps us understand. Even when technology helps us save time, that time does not necessarily become free time. In a neoliberal society organized around the sexual division of labor, the time supposedly freed up by machines does not become time for rest, political organizing, or pleasure. There is always an enormous amount of care work to be done, especially in a context of increasingly precarious public services. Women are increasingly called upon to make up for the lack of public policies on education, health, and social assistance. Technologies cannot, on their own, redistribute women’s work or ensure that it is valued.
Moreover, most of these tools claim to be designed for women but require things that most rural women do not have: land registered in their own name, access to credit, their own mobile phone, an internet connection, and time to develop digital literacy. When these tools reach rural areas, they are taken up by those who already have the means to adopt them, generally men more closely connected to commercial agriculture. Where there is wage labor, the digitalization of agriculture serves to surveil workers, intensify the pace of work, make working conditions more precarious, and introduce the agribusiness technology package into rural areas.
What We Are Building
Our analysis should not lead us to reject technology. Instead, it points to the urgent need to build digital sovereignty, which must become part of our agenda of struggle alongside food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, and people’s sovereignty.
Techno-solutionist discourse presents itself as the answer to the hardship of agricultural labor and women’s excessive workloads, both of which are real problems. It is no coincidence that, in corporate discourse, women appear primarily as entrepreneurs who need training in “digital skills.” They are never understood as collective political subjects with a project of their own. Addressing these problems requires transforming society as a whole and reorganizing the social and sexual division of labor. This transformation must be grounded in our own alternatives, including the countless technologies developed by peasant women and men that strengthen their autonomy. Examples include seed banks, machinery and agricultural implements adapted to local realities, marketing networks based on the solidarity economy, and biological inputs, among others.
At this moment, it is urgent to affirm these and other alternatives as the technological paradigm we want. This means strengthening what we have already built while also forging new alliances and creating new spaces for cooperation.
Natália Lobo is an agroecologist, a member of the team at SOF Sempreviva Organização Feminista, and an activist with the World March of Women in Brazil.
