Digitalization and the third food regime
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Digitalization and the third food regime Louisa Prause1 · Sarah Hackfort1 · Margit Lindgren1 Accepted: 19 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This article asks how the application of digital technologies is changing the organization of the agri-food system in the context of the third food regime. The academic debate on digitalization and food largely focuses on the input and farm level. Yet, based on the analysis of 280 digital services and products, we show that digital technologies are now being used along the entire food commodity chain. We argue that digital technologies in the third food regime serve on the one hand as a continuation of established information and communication technologies, thus deepening certain features of the existing food regime such as the retail sector’s control over global commodity chains. On the other hand, digital technologies also introduce new forms of control and value extraction based on the use of data and pave the way for large tech companies to take over market shares in the agri-food sector. Finally, we find that multinational agri-food companies are starting to take on the business models of leading digital tech companies, for instance by developing digital platforms throughout the agri-food system. We argue that this shows that the broader economic restructuring of neoliberal capitalism towards digital capitalism is also making its way into the agri-food system. Keywords Food regime · Digital agriculture · Agri-food system · Food commodity chain · Agrarian labor · Digital platforms
Introduction The digitalization of agriculture is widely hailed as the next agricultural revolution that will change how food is produced and consumed (e.g. Trendov et al. 2019). Both political and corporate leaders argue that digitalization offers the solution to feeding a growing world population, while at the same time mitigating the negative environmental and climate consequences of (industrial) agriculture (see Newell and Taylor 2017). The digitalization of food production has become a key component of various governments’ recent bioeconomy strategies and is being pushed in international fora such as the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020-10161-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Louisa Prause louisa.prause@hu‑berlin.de 1
Department of Agriculture and Food Policy, Research Group BioMaterialities, Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
(FAO), which is about to establish an International Digital Council for Food and Agriculture (FAO 2020b). The academic literature offers a slightly more nuanced picture. Digital agriculture might help farmers to be more precise with inputs by offering information on ecological conditions through precise weather forecasts or sensors scanning the soil (for an overview, see Klerkx et al. 2019; Lezoche et al. 2020). Furthermore, farms will be able to reduce labor costs thr
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