“Agri-tech and food systems in Latin America: risks and alternatives from a human rights perspective” – 20 April 2023

The article *The Big Tech Takeover of Food Systems in Latin America: Elements for a Human Rights-based Alternative" first published in IT for change, is now available in Spanish “Agritech y sistemas alimentarios en América Latina” and has been launched in a webinar this week.

The report portrays the risks to food systems in Latin America which face an avalanche of corporate agri-tech initiatives and proposes human rights-based alternatives.

Large corporations, such as Microsoft, the financial sector, some states and multilateral organizations, such as the Inter-American Development Bank, promote data "solutions" and digitization technologies for use in agriculture. Through advisory services and digital financing, they are penetrating peasant agriculture and carbon trading… These technologies are promoted and imposed as definitive solutions to world hunger, "climate change" and the crisis in our food systems. However, there is growing evidence that their objective is in fact to deepen corporate control of food. This is an extractivist and neocolonial strategy, harnessing science and technology to further dispossession, exploitation and consolidation of a corporate agri-food system. … It is urgent to defend the individual and collective economic rights of peasants and indigenous peoples over their data, and to guarantee public control over digital infrastructure. In the Colombian context, the state’s perspective on digitalization as a solution has become a common mantra. But it presents serious risks, not least the loss of national sovereignty over data that can threaten national security...