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A leading international researcher on biodiversity and corporate power in agriculture has warned that the rapid convergence of technology giants and agribusiness conglomerates is creating a new and largely invisible threat to African farmers, one in which data, not land, has become the primary instrument of control.
Lim Li Ching, co-chair of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES Food) and a senior researcher at the Third World Network (TWN), made the argument in Episode 22 of The Battle for African Agriculture, a podcast hosted by Dr. Million Belay, General Coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA).
Drawing from the new IPES Food report “Head in the Clouds,” released on February 25, 2026, Lim Li Ching examined how major technology firms including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba are forging alliances with agribusiness giants such as Bayer and John Deere, deploying artificial intelligence and cloud-based platforms to mediate farming decisions while harvesting farm-level data for profit, often without meaningful transparency or accountability to farmers themselves.
The report argues that this shift is concentrating control in the hands of a small number of corporations, increasing farmer dependency, and reinforcing the high-cost, high-input production models that already place structural pressure on smallholder agriculture across the continent.
Lim Li Ching, who has spent more than two decades working on biosafety, seed sovereignty, and global negotiations on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), said debates over agricultural technology have always been fundamentally political. The question, she argued, is never simply whether a technology works, but who controls it, who benefits from it, and whose knowledge systems it displaces.
Civil society organisations across Africa have begun describing these dynamics as a form of “biopiracy 2.0,” referring to the digitisation and patenting of indigenous seeds and livestock genetics, a concern that surfaced prominently at the Pan-African Declaration on the Future of Biodigital Technologies convening in Addis Ababa in October 2025.
The ecological costs of corporate digital agriculture, Lim Li Ching said, extend beyond the farm gate. The data infrastructure underpinning precision agriculture platforms demands enormous quantities of energy, water, and minerals, inputs often extracted from the Global South with limited benefit flowing back to those communities.
The IPES Food report does not reject technology outright. It documents numerous farmer-led and community-based innovations, from open-source digital tools to participatory crop breeding and ecological pest management, that are already delivering measurable benefits for climate resilience, biodiversity, and local food systems. These approaches, it argues, remain systematically underfunded and marginalised in policy and investment decisions relative to their corporate-led counterparts.
The full conversation with Lim Li Ching is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and across AFSA’s social media platforms. The Battle for African Agriculture releases new episodes every Friday. The series is supported by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).
