Techno-Utopian Vision of Food Sustainability
Discussion
Stephen Leitheiser and Lummina Horlings:
"The techno-utopian vision is rooted in the belief that further development of (centrally controlled) technologies will bring about a sustainable food future. With precision agriculture through digitalisation, and ‘green’ innovations through the miracles of science, it continues the trajectory of the industrial food system, which began its global ascendancy with the spread of Green Revolution in the 1960s. Since then, capital-intensive farming technologies – including chemical fertilisers and pesticides, hybrid seeds and fossil-fuel- powered machinery – have displaced subsistence food production around the world and enrolled human labour and appetites into global commodity markets.
It is widely accepted that this trajectory must be altered in the face of new challenges, and the architects and benefactors of the global industrial food system have rushed to develop their own solutions. Although their prescriptions may appear different, they merely put a new coat of paint on current trajectories. Profit motives, driven by new investment frontiers, blind the techno-utopians to the hubristic risks inherent in their vision. For the techno-utopians, everything must change so that nothing has to change. In other words, radical revolutions to established ways of doing things – like producing food in a lab instead of a field, or using robots instead of workers to plant vegetables – are not only allowed, but required, to ensure that the structural relationships of centralised corporate control can remain intact. Ultimately, the assumptions of techno-utopians – that food production is inherently antagonistic to nature and that technology alone can solve our problems – increase the disconnection of food production from space and place, and conveniently ignore modes of production, distribution and consumption that do not align with (capitalist) economic interests.
Digitalisation in agriculture refers to the use of information communication technologies (ICTs), big data and artificial intelligence (AI). Using drones and sensors to monitor local conditions, digitalisation is seen to enable ‘precision agriculture’ – a more efficient use of inputs, adapted to local conditions. Although digitalisation takes local geo-data conditions into account, these patented technologies remain centrally controlled by just a handful of multinational corporations (MNCs) with monopoly shares in global markets. Many farmers around the world are already dependent on MNCs for both agricultural inputs and access to commodity markets. This dependency has largely come about as a result of policies enforced by the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) structural-adjustment loans in recent decades. WTO policies have not only destroyed vibrant subsistence food economies; they have also actually worsened standards of living for local communities in many cases, and decreased their autonomy (Shiva, 2016). Top-down digitalisation would only continue these trends, as farmers would become more reliant on centrally controlled corporate products and expertise.
Moreover, there are many reasons to scrutinise the techno-utopian promise of digital sustainability. For example, ICTs and AI have immense social and environmental impacts that are often overlooked. These include the many toxic environmental processes associated with the production of ICT and AI hardware (e.g. mining, energy consumption, waste disposal), and the toxic social processes that go into the acquisition of these materials (e.g. the child labour used to mine coltan in Congo). While digital technologies may indeed play some role in sustainable food systems, the techno-utopian insistence on using them as a ‘silver bullet’ is fool’s gold. A plethora of techno-utopian ‘green’ food innovations have also promised to bring about a sustainable food future. Several Silicon Valley-funded start-ups – including ‘Beyond Meat’ and ‘Impossible Foods’ – promise to innovate new plant-based replacement products that are healthier and more sustainable than their traditional counterparts produced through morally and environmentally harmful factory farming.
However, as with digitalisation, proponents of these innovative food products fail to recognise the massive risks. In addition to the dangers of introducing radical novelty into human diets, these products are driven by yet another profit-making frontier that keeps the relationships of the dominant global food system mostly intact – dependent on centralised structures and energy-intensive processing and driven by short-term profits. For example, the ‘plant-based’ innovations incorporate a variety of cheap commodities from the global market, which are then centrally processed and sold with a significant profit margin that does not reward the producer and creates competition between farmers worldwide." (https://www.arc2020.eu/planning-for-food-commons-in-the-post-covid-world/)