by Mokhtar Ben mlouka (Policy Intern at CELI)
The vision of a smart and precision led agriculture, which lies at the center of the European Green Deal and the EU’s Digital Decade, promises several much-needed improvements in the sector, mainly a future of optimized resource use ensuring a reduced environmental impact, and enhanced resilience in the face of a changing climate. Agriculture is a significant contributor to environmental pressures, even though between 2005 and 2022, the EU’s agricultural GHG emissions had an overall decreasing trend of 5%[1], it is still responsible for over 12% of the EU’s total greenhouse gas emissions and a primary source of water pollution from nutrient runoff[2]. Furthermore, climate change is a severe threat to global food security as studies project that without adaptation, global crop yields could decline by up to 25% by 2050[3].
The implementation of different technology driven solutions to digitalize the sector have been strongly promoted for by the EU[4] and notably supported by a consistent EU policy framework and major research and innovation initiatives such as ATLAS, DEMETER and the Common European Agricultural Data Space which have led to positive outcomes and provide a promising future for the agricultural sector.
These digital technologies are enhancing efficiency across the entire value chain, from manufacturers and agro-chemical providers to retailers and consumers, by reducing inputs such as energy and cutting emissions, while improving communication and automated data transfer. Digitalisation also drives competitiveness and supports innovation by enabling SMEs and start-ups to emerge with new agri-food solutions. Increased automation and robotics also reduce farmers’ physical workload and improve animal welfare by continuously monitoring livestock health, as stated by the European Commission’s Political Guidelines[5].
However, despite the positive aspects of this trend, the narrative of technologically driven progress that has the potential to save the world often disregards the potential risk of a deeper systemic transformation, a so-called digital enclosure of the farm.
This paper argues that the benign technological advancement and digitization in the European agricultural context comes with a high risk of falling into a corporate grab, and points to the importance of taking a number of precautions and protective measures to prevent the occurrence of such enclosure within the EU.
This analysis proceeds in four parts. First, I will revisit the Green Revolution and the GMO debate as historical precedents that blueprint the corporate strategy of creating technological dependency. Second, I will examine the specific mechanisms of the contemporary digital revolution in agriculture, showcasing how platformization and data extraction serve to strengthen oligopolistic control. Third, employing Food Regime Theory as a critical lens, I attempt to frame this technological shift as part of a broader restructuring of the global agri-food system. And fourth, I will assess the EU’s reactivity to the matter.
Historical Precedents and the Emergence of Corporate Control
To demystify the future promised by digital agri-tech, one must first understand the past. The post-World War II Green Revolution which is highly praised as a mission to end global hunger, introduced a standardized package of hybrid seeds followed by synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. These technologies are not open access and are controlled by a small number of corporations (Kloppenburg, 2010), and while the revolution succeeded in increasing yields, its deeper impact was a systematic transfer of agricultural knowledge and autonomy from farmers to corporations, a dispossession (Kloppenburg, 1988). This process, a form of appropriationism, whereby elements of the production process once managed on-farm are progressively replaced by industrially produced commodities resulted in the seed which is the very basis of reproductive autonomy being transformed from a saved resource into an annual purchase. This created a structural dependency, locking farmers into a capital-intensive system where they became price-takers for inputs. The global seed market, for instance, is now dominated by a handful of firms, with Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, and BASF controlling over 50% of the global proprietary seed market[6].
The corporate strategy evolved further with the advent of agricultural biotechnology and revealed its strong ambitions of ensuring market control through intellectual property. Corporations like Monsanto engineered not just plants for herbicide tolerance, but also legal instruments for market control. The development of Genetic Use Restriction Technologies, generally known as “Terminator” technology, aimed to biologically prevent seed saving. More successfully, the application of utility patents to genes allowed corporations to claim ownership over life itself. As Jack Kloppenburg states in “First the Seed”[7], this established a regime where farmers could be sued for patent infringement if patented transgenes were found in their fields, even through accidental drift[8]. The GMO paradigm thus established a powerful precedent by which the means of production could be legally and biologically enclosed.
The Digital Agri-Tech Revolution as a New Frontier for Monopoly
The current digital transformation has brought along significant technologies such as precision agriculture, the use of big data, IoT, and AI, all of which represent the next logical step in this trajectory of appropriation. The actors are the familiar mix of consolidated agribusiness giants (Bayer, Corteva, BASF, Syngenta..) now joined by technology behemoths like Microsoft, Amazon, and Bosch, creating a powerful digital-agricultural complex.
The new paradigm presents a symbiotic model. The core product is not necessarily a discrete input but an integrated digital platform. John Deere, for instance, no longer simply sells tractors; it sells rolling computers whose software is protected by digital locks. This has sparked the “right to repair” movement, as farmers are legally and technically barred from fixing their own equipment, forcing them into dependency on authorized dealers[9].
These digital platforms are also powerful data extractors as every pass of a tractor, every drone flight, and every sensor reading generates valuable data which has become a new primary commodity. As Fraser (2019) argues, this creates a double appropriation where farmers not only pay for the technology that collects the data, but the value of the data itself is appropriated by the platform owner. This data has the potential to exert greater control over the entire agricultural value chain. The corporation leverages this position to create a rentier model which levees continuous fees for software subscriptions and access, creating a perpetual revenue stream.
Figure 1: What are the biggest risks of digitizing agriculture according to farmers ?
This leads to an oligopolistic stranglehold on the agricultural technology stack. A handful of firms aim to control the hardware through control of the machinery, the software through farm management information systems, the data, and the optimized biological inputs which are the seeds and chemical inputs. The output is also controlled through food processing facilitated by the supermarket revolution. All creating a locked in ecosystem.
Food Regime Theory and the Digital Shift
To fully understand the structural significance of this digital turn, it is important to place it within the macro-historical framework of Food Regime Theory. First presented by Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael, the theory analyzes food regimes as rule-governed structures that align global agriculture with the needs of the dominant political-economic power of the era[10]
The EU’s active promotion of digitization can be seen as a key mechanism in the contested transition from the second, “corporate-mercantile” food regime to a newly born third regime, one which is characterized by the fusion of financial capital and biotechnology as an internal component. The EU’s regulatory environment is often described as having strong precautionary principles, however, its regulatory framework can paradoxically accelerate the concentration the regime facilitates. The high compliance costs and extensive safety testing as well as complex IP laws create significant barriers to entry, ensuring that only the most capitalized corporations can access and establish their proprietary systems as the de facto standards require.
An Assessment of EU Legislations and Policies in Addressing the Issue :
The EU had taken numerous countermeasures, notably its support to small farms and farmers who remain, according to the European Comission[11], the cornerstone of EU agriculture as they play a vital role in supporting rural employment and contribute to territorial development and are provided with financial support through multiple programme plans most famously the PSF, which proved to be important in enhancing equity in the sector. Additionally, The EU had taken numerous steps towards safeguarding data sharing, data sovereignty, and data security to build trust and not jeopardise further development and acceptance of smart farming. The EU had recently adopted the Data Act[12] to ensure fair data sharing across sectors and further individual and business protection. Additionally, the EU Code of Conduct on agricultural data sharing which was set up by a group of associations from the EU agri-food chain provides guidance on the use of agricultural data, particularly the rights to access and use it. On top of that, the European strategy for Data, the Commission announced the Common European Agricultural Data Space (CEADS) to facilitate trustworthy sharing of agricultural data between private stakeholders such as farmers, machinery companies, data service providers and public authorities on the other end. The implementation follows a step-wise approach, starting with a preparatory action “AgridataSpace”, followed by a deployment action, both funded under the Digital Europe Programme.
Conclusion
The digitization of European agriculture is undeniably a great tool to ensuring the sustainability and innovation needed in the sector, but if left unchecked it has the potential to become a powerful engine of corporate enclosure. The historical lessons of the Green Revolution and the GMO struggle provide a clear reminder that technological packages are rarely just about productivity, they are also and above all about power. By creating locked-in systems of dependency through platformization, data extraction, and intellectual property, a corporate oligopoly is positioning itself as the indispensable monopolizing power of the future food system, taking control of the entire value chain. The resulting social divide is fundamental. Digital farming can however also bring consumers and farmers closer together. With simplified and more comprehensive opportunities for food traceability, knowledge about and appreciation of agricultural production and foods can be enhanced further.
The future of a truly resilient and sovereign European agriculture therefore depends not on uncritically adopting every digital tool, but on consciously designing technological and governance systems, such as data cooperatives and open-source platforms which reinforces farmer autonomy and break the control of the digital rentier.
[1] EEA (2024) https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-agriculture
[2] Eurostat (2025) https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/tai08/default/table?lang=en
[3] IPCC (2022) https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/#:~:text=Sustainable%20food%20supply%20and%20food,.1%2C%201.3.3%7D
[4] European Commission : Digitalising the EU agricultural sector (https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digitalisation-agriculture)
[5] See : https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digitalisation-agriculture
[6] ETC Group : Corporate Concentration in Food and Farming https://etcgroup.org/sites/www.etcgroup.org/files/files/top_10_agribusiness_giants.pdf
[7] J. Kloppenburg, First the Seed https://www.researchgate.net/publication/37699286_First_the_Seed_The_Political_Economy_of_Plant_Biotechnology
[8] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto-sues-farmers-seed-patents
[9] See : https://farmaction.us/righttorepair/
[10] Mc Michael, 2009, A Food Regime Genealogy : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150902820354
[11] European Commission : PSF : https://agriculture.ec.europa.eu/common-agricultural-policy/income-support/additional-schemes/payments-small-farmers_en
[12] See : https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/data-act
