[News] In the Name of Saving the Climate, They Will Uberise the Farmlands
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Thu Nov 18 10:51:17 EST 2021
In the Name of Saving the Climate, They Will Uberise the Farmlands: The
Forty-Sixth Newsletter (2021)
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*In the Name of Saving the Climate, They Will Uberise the Farmlands: The
Forty-Sixth Newsletter (2021)*
Mining Cryptocurrency, 2021
/Mining Cryptocurrency, /2021.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research
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As the last private plane takes off from the Glasgow airport and the
dust settles, the detritus of the 26th United Nations Climate Change
Conference, COP26, remains. The final communiqués are slowly being
digested, their limited scope inevitable. António Guterres,
Secretary-General of the United Nations, closed
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the proceedings by painting two dire images: ‘Our fragile planet is
hanging by a thread. We are still knocking on the door of climate
catastrophe. It is time to go into emergency mode – or our chance of
reaching net zero will itself be zero’. The loudest cheer in the main
hall did not erupt when this final verdict was announced, but when it
was proclaimed that the next COP would be held in Cairo, Egypt in 2022.
It seems enough to know that another COP will take place.
An army of corporate executives and lobbyists crowded the official COP26
platforms; in the evening, their cocktail parties entertained government
officials. While the cameras focused on official speeches, the real
business was being done in these evening parties and in private rooms.
The very people who are most responsible for the climate catastrophe
shaped many of the proposals that were brought to the table at COP26.
Meanwhile, climate activists had to resort to making as loud a noise as
possible far from the Scottish Exchange Campus (SEC Centre), where the
summit was hosted. It is telling that the SEC Centre was built on the
same land as the Queen’s Dock, once a lucrative passageway for goods
extracted from the colonies to flow into Britain. Now, old colonial
habits revive themselves as developed countries – in cahoots with a few
developing states that are captured by their corporate overlords –
refuse to accept firm carbon limits and contribute the billions of
dollars necessary for the climate fund.
Cloud Ccomputing, 2021.
/Cloud Computing, /2021.
The organisers of COP26 designated themes for many of the days during
the conference, such as energy, finance, and transport. There was no day
set aside for a discussion of agriculture; instead, it was bundled into
‘Nature Day
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on 6 November, during which the main topic was deforestation. No focused
discussion took place about the carbon dioxide, methane, or nitrous
oxide emitted from agricultural processes and the global food system,
despite the fact that the global food system produces
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between 21% and 37% of annual greenhouse gas emissions. Not long before
COP26, three United Nations agencies released a key report, which
offered the following assessment
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‘At a time when many countries’ public finances are constrained,
particularly in the developing world, global agricultural support to
producers currently accounts for almost USD 540 billion a year. Over
two-thirds of this support is considered price-distorting and largely
harmful to the environment’. Yet at COP26, there was a notable silence
around the distorted food system that pollutes the Earth and our bodies;
there was no serious conversation about any transformation
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of the food system to produce healthy food and sustain life on the planet.
Instead, the United States and the United Arab Emirates, backed by most
of the developed states, proposed an Agriculture Innovation Mission for
Climate (AIM4C
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programme to champion agribusiness and the role of big technology
corporations in agriculture. Big Tech companies, such as Amazon and
Microsoft, and agricultural technology (Ag Tech) firms – such as Bayer,
Cargill, and John Deere – are pushing a new digital agricultural model
through which they seek to deepen their control over global food systems
in the name of mitigating the effects of climate change. Stunningly,
this new, ‘game-changing’ solution for climate change does not mention
farmers anywhere in its key documents; after all, it seems to envisage a
future that does not require them. The entry of Ag Tech and Big Tech
into the agricultural industry has meant a takeover of the entire
process, from the management of inputs to the marketing of produce. This
consolidates power along the food chain in the hands of some of the
world’s largest food commodity trading firms. These firms, often called
the ABCDs – Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus –
already control
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more than 70% of the agricultural market.
Ag Tech and Big Tech firms are championing a kind of uberisation of
farmlands in an effort to dominate all aspects of food production. This
ensures that it is the powerless smallholders and agricultural workers
who take on all the risks. The German pharmaceutical company Bayer’s
partnership
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with the US non-profit Precision Agriculture for Development (PAD)
intends to use e-extension training to control what and how farmers grow
their produce, as agribusinesses reap the benefits without taking on
risk. This is another instance of neoliberalism at work, displacing the
risk onto workers whose labour produces vast profits for the Ag Tech and
Big Tech firms. These big firms are not interested in owning land or
other resources; they merely want to control the production process so
that they can continue to make fabulous profits.
Genetic Patent, 2021
/Genetic Patent, /2021.
The ongoing protests
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by Indian farmers, which began just over a year ago in October 2020, are
rooted in farmers’ justified fear of the digitalisation of agriculture
by the large global agribusinesses. Farmers fear that removing
government regulation of the marketplaces will instead draw them into
marketplaces controlled by digital platforms that are created by
companies like Meta
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(Facebook), Google, and Reliance. Not only will these companies use
their control over the platforms to define production and distribution,
but their mastery over data will allow them to dominate the entire food
cycle from production forms to consumption habits.
Earlier this year, the Landless Workers Movement
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(MST) in Brazil held a seminar on digital technology and class struggle
to better understand the tentacles of the Ag Tech and Big Tech firms and
how to overcome their powerful presence in the world of agriculture. Out
of this seminar emerged our most recent dossier
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no. 46, /Big Tech and the Current Challenges Facing the Class Struggle/,
which seeks to ‘understand technological transformations and their
social consequences with an eye towards class struggle’ rather than to
‘provide an exhaustive discussion or conclusion on these themes’. The
dossier summarises a rich discussion about several topics, including the
relationship between technology and capitalism, the role of the state
and technology, the intimate partnership between finance and tech firms,
and the role of Ag Tech and Big Tech in our fields and factories.
**The section on agriculture (‘Big Tech against Nature’) introduces us
to the world of agribusiness and farming, where the large Ag Tech and
Big Tech firms seek to absorb and control the knowledge of the
countryside, shape agriculture to suit the interests of the big firms’
profit margins, and reduce agriculturalists to the status of precarious
gig workers. The dossier closes with a consideration of five major
conditions that are behind the expansion of the digital economy, each of
them suited to the growth of Ag Tech in rural areas:
* *A free market (for data)*. User data is freely siphoned off by
these firms, which then convert it into proprietary information to
deepen corporate control over agricultural systems.
* *Economic financialisation.* Data capitalist companies depend on the
flux of speculative capital to grow and consolidate. These companies
bear witness to capital flight, shifting capital away from
productive sectors and towards those that are merely speculative.
This puts increasing pressure on productive sectors to increase
exploitation and precarisation.
* *The transformation of rights into commodities.* The fact that
public intervention is being superseded by private companies’
meddling in arenas of economic and social life subordinates our
rights as citizens to our potential as commodities.
* *The reduction of public spaces.* Society begins to be seen less as
a collective whole and more as the segmented desires of individuals,
with gig work seen as liberation rather than as a form of
subordination to the power of large corporations.
* *The concentration of resources, productive chains, and
infrastructure*. Centralisation of resources and power amongst a
handful of corporations gives them enormous leverage over the state
and society. The great power concentrated in these corporations
overrides any democratic and popular debate on political, economic,
environmental, and ethical questions.
The Fragmentation of Work
, 2021
/The Fragmentation of Work, /2021.
In 2017, at COP23, participating countries set up the Koronivia Joint
Work on Agriculture
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(KJWA), a process that pledged to focus on agriculture’s contribution to
climate change. KJWA held a few events at COP26, but these were not
given much attention. On Nature Day, forty-five countries endorsed
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the /Global Action Agenda for Innovation in Agriculture/, whose main
slogan, ‘innovation in agriculture’, aligns with the goals of the Ag
Tech and Big Tech sector. This message is being channelled through CGIAR
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an inter-governmental body designed to promote ‘new innovations’.
Farmers are being delivered into the hands of Ag Tech and Big Tech
firms, who – rather than committing to avert the climate catastrophe –
prioritise accumulating the greatest profit for themselves while
greenwashing their activities. This hunger for profit is neither going
to end world hunger
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nor will it end the climate catastrophe.
Connected Cables, 2021.
/Connected Cables, /2021.
The images in this newsletter come from dossier no. 46
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=56512bcbc6&e=d206d0a40d>,
/Big Tech and the Current Challenges Facing the Class Struggle/. They
build on a playful understanding of the concepts underpinning the
digital world: clouds, mining, codes, and so on. How to depict these
abstractions? ‘A data cloud’, writes Tricontinental: Institute for
Social Research’s art department, ‘sounds like an ethereal, magical
place. It is, in reality, anything but that. The images in this dossier
aim to visualise the materiality of the digital world we live in. A
cloud is projected onto a chipboard’. These images remind us that
technology is not neutral; technology is a part of the class struggle.
The farmers in India would agree.
Warmly,
Vijay
Website <www.eltricontinental.org>
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