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Paper short abstract

The use AI is mainly targeted to large Western, often male-operated, farms. This may deepen gender inequality, disadvantaging female smallholders in the Global South. This presentation proposes a feminist, intersectional approach to make AI in agri-food more just and context-sensitive.

Paper long abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to be mainly deployed on large, Western, monocultural farms (Ryan, 2020), which tend to be owned and operated by men. This may therefore result in a gendered inequality between large, wealthy farmers in the Global North (primarily men) and poorer, smallholder farmers in the Global South (primarily women). This may disadvantage women in the Global South and push them out of the sector, harming diversity and inclusion.

While some research has been done on the impacts of AI on gender in food systems, it mainly focuses on justice and fairness, costs, labour, and power asymmetries (Ryan and Rijswijk, 2026). Most articles, however, overlook the structural issues underlying women’s capabilities, their financial means to access AI, and contextual factors such as local norms, kinship, and social relations. Contextual factors determine levels and forms of inclusion and exclusion, and concern aspects linked to access, design and the broader system complexity in which people, digital technologies and the physical environment are connected. Furthermore, little attention is paid to actually addressing these gender-related issues.

This presentation develops a feminist approach that responds to these issues and that supports collective action towards more accessibility, more inclusive technological design, and helps to navigate system complexity. By applying feminist theoretical approaches (e.g., Iris Marion Young, Martha Nussbaum, Nancy Fraser, and bell hooks) to structural injustices, this presentation will propose steps beyond techno-centric and Western paradigms to embrace an intersectional, just, and context-sensitive approach to AI development and use in the agri-food sector.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines why current paradigms of technologies for food futures have not taken adequate account of the crucial roles that women play in providing food for their household and managing seeds in their community and the implications for gender equality in sustainable food systems.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines contending paradigms for examining food futures, and how they are impacted by the changing relationship between state policy and food production. Recent announcements indicate a shift in the focus of agricultural policy making institutions towards the relationship between agriculture and national security (UK Cabinet Office, 2025), and away from the established goals of reducing absolute hunger in the poorest countries. Such shifts move policy away from distributional concerns of increasing inequality in food security, and towards agricultural production using GM crops and new food technologies. This greater technological emphasis can easily lead to national heavy handedness, an approach which already has a history of overlooking smallholders to agricultural innovations. This top-down approach also has the adverse consequence of failing to recognise the important role played by women farmers, in using local materials and seeds to improve food availability for their families (Quisumbing and Doss, 2021). Indeed, the emphasis in low-income countries is on strengthening agricultural markets, adoption of new agricultural technologies and incorporation of private sector actors to ensure the incorporation of farmers into global agricultural supply chains, without explicit regard for gender equality (Vercillo et. al, 2023). The paper uses evidence from local food systems in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, to make the case that in the context of the current climate crisis, it is crucial that women’s contribution to local food circuits as well as their role as knowledge brokers is a central building block for creating more equitable and sustainable food futures.

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Paper short abstract

We evaluated a digital advisory service reaching millions of farmers in eastern India. The service improved agricultural knowledge, practices, and yields, while reducing crop loss. Effects are largest in areas hit by weather shocks, where harvests increased by 9% and severe crop loss fell by 21%.

Paper long abstract

We evaluate at scale the impact of a digital agricultural advisory service reaching millions of smallholder farmers in an eastern state of India. We randomized the rollout of the service among rice farmers within five districts, and measured the impact on agricultural outcomes using both survey and remote sensing data. Using survey data, we find that access to the digital service leads to significant improvements in farmers’ knowledge and adoption of recommended practices, a modest increase in rice yield and harvest, and a large reduction in the likelihood of rice crop loss on average. Further analyses suggest that the treatment impact is concentrated in areas hit by weather shocks such as excess and inadequate rainfall, increasing harvest by up to 9% and reducing severe crop loss by up to 21% in affected areas. We use vegetation indices (VIs) to construct an objective yield measure for all farmers in the study sample and confirm that our key survey results are robust against differential attrition, reporting biases, and survey sample selection.

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Paper short abstract

This paper challenges techno-centric agricultural development by showing that gender inequality operates through market structures, not access gaps. Women farmers in India face 40 to 60 percent higher costs due to credit discrimination and gendered labour markets, barriers no technology can bridge.

Paper long abstract

Digital agricultural technologies and climate-smart interventions are widely promoted as pathways to inclusive and resilient food systems. Yet such techno-centric approaches rest on the assumption that gender inequality in agriculture arises primarily from access gaps that technology can bridge. This paper challenges this assumption by demonstrating that gender inequality is produced through market structures that technology alone cannot overcome.

Drawing on qualitative research with 32 women-headed farming households across three districts in Telangana, India, I document how women cultivators face production costs 40-60 percent higher than male-headed households farming equivalent land. This differential arises not from technological limitations but from structural discrimination: credit markets that exclude women without land titles, forcing reliance on informal lenders charging 36-50 percent interest compared to 7-12 percent from institutional sources; input dealers who exploit women's perceived lack of agricultural knowledge; and labour markets that require women to hire male workers for tasks culturally designated as masculine. These gendered cost structures persist regardless of the adoption of technology.

The findings reveal fundamental limits to techno-centric development paradigms. Even when equipped with digital tools, weather information, and improved seeds, women farmers remain uncompetitive as long as structural inequalities in access to markets and the cost of capital persist. The paper concludes that food security agendas must move beyond a focus on technology dissemination to address and transform the gendered relations that shape agricultural factor markets, including credit systems, input supply chains, and labour arrangements, as prerequisites for building genuinely inclusive agrarian futures.

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Paper short abstract

This study examines how gender and group membership shape digital inequality in smallholder agriculture. Using mixed methods, it finds men in farmer groups have the highest digital use, while women outside groups are most excluded, reflecting layered gendered power relations beyond infrastructure.

Paper long abstract

This paper aims to explore how gender and group membership intersect to shape digital inequality in smallholder agriculture, with a particular focus on women who are excluded from farmer collectives. This study is mixed-method approach which integrating quantitative analysis through Mann-Whitney U test and qualitative data using thematic analysis. Quantitative data found that there are significant differences in digital engagement, showing that men, especially those affiliated with farmer groups, report the highest levels of agricultural internet use, while women outside farmer groups consistently demonstrate the lowest levels. Digital access in agriculture is clearly unequal, shaped by both gender and group membership. Men who are part of farmer groups tend to use digital platforms as tools for experimentation, innovation, and personal advancement. Women in KWT, on the other hand, engage with digital agriculture mainly through collective activities, where farming is valued not only for income but also for social connection and emotional satisfaction. A very different situation is experienced by women outside farmer groups. For them, agricultural work is rarely seen as a personal choice or source of fulfillment, but rather as an obligation tied to their role as wives. In other words, this study shows that digital inequality in agriculture is not simply a problem of infrastructure or digital skills. Digital agriculture programs that ignore these social realities risk benefiting only those who already hold power, while further marginalizing women who remain outside collective structures.

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Paper short abstract

This paper explores approaches to tackle coastal soil salinization by women smallholder agricultural workers in South India. It identifies women workers’ strategies to deal with changes in land use, cropping patterns and mechanisation, aiming to improve ecosystem services and secure livelihoods.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores approaches to tackle coastal soil salinization by women who are largely landless/smallholders and primarily depend on natural resources for their livelihoods. In the context of a high proportion of agricultural workers rather than owner-cultivators in the study site, this paper unpacks the different dimensions of the vulnerabilities they face due to land degradation, and at the same time, identifies women’s strategies to halt further degradation through a revival of ecosystem services through appropriate on-farm activities. Conservation of soil and water in public and private lands both reduces salinization and enhances productivity, securing livelihoods in the process.

Through a qualitative thematic analysis in a coastal delta region of Tamil Nadu, South India, the paper identified changes in cropping patterns, cropping intensity and land use, alongside increase in farm mechanisation as key drivers deepening agricultural workers’ vulnerabilities. These changes are contributing to a rise in gendered disparities in the types of employment available in farming, wages, potential for diversification to the non-farm sector, the emergence of caste-centred non-farm work, and persistent, low-value family farming by women.

The region has been declared as a Special Agricultural Zone by the state government. Given the high proportion of women agricultural workers in the region, the paper highlights specific actions to restore farming and foster gender and caste equality in a changing context, subject to growing climate risks alongside socio-economic precarity.

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Paper short abstract

Female tomato traders in Ghana offer a possible vantage point to explore agrifood resilience, showing how women’s intersecting social and economic networks shape responses to digital transformation and underpin sustainable, equitable food‑security futures through female agency.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how gender, technology, and inequality intersect within Ghana’s fresh tomato value chain by foregrounding the experiences and positionality of female wholesale traders. Drawing on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork (2024–2025), I analyse how these women navigate a food system shaped by climate volatility, market uncertainty, and a strong female monopoly on the marketing of fresh tomatoes based on relational economic and social network activities. While policy narratives increasingly promote digital agriculture and climate‑smart solutions as pathways to resilience, such interventions often overlook the informal infrastructures through which most fresh food circulates in Ghana. Female traders—despite being central to the functioning of the agrifood system— often remain excluded from technological innovation programs, credit schemes, and market information platforms tailored primarily to farmers or formalised actors. Simultaneously, they are disproportionately blamed for price increases.

Through a feminist political economy lens, the paper shows how traders rely on long‑standing social relations, collective practices, and kinship‑based networks to manage risk, stabilise supply, and reorganise labour in response to environmental and market shocks. Their everyday strategies reveal forms of resilience and economic governance that operate outside techno‑centric logics, while simultaneously exposing deeply gendered inequalities in access to land, capital, and decision‑making power.

By situating traders’ experiences within broader political‑economic discourse, the paper raises the question of how traders may act as a vantage point for (digital) transformation. It argues that equitable agrarian futures require recognising and engaging with the informal, gendered institutions that sustain food systems across the Global South.

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Paper short abstract

We explore women’s urban horticulture in Medellín and Bissau as heritage-based innovations: low-tech, gendered gardening practices that, amid exclusion from agri-tech schemes, adapt to climate stress and urban inequality while sustaining diets, income and more plural visions of food-system futures.

Paper long abstract

This paper argues that women’s urban horticulture in Medellín (Colombia) and Bissau (Guinea-Bissau) constitutes heritage based innovation that remains invisible in technocentric development debates. It asks whose knowledge counts when food system futures are imagined.

In Medellín, women displaced by climate and conflict establish household and collective plots on steep slopes and residual urban land in low income neighbourhoods, producing vegetables and seasoning plants for cooking and small sales. In and around Bissau, women cultivate household and peri-urban plots on wetland margins and in expanding neighbourhoods, adapting longstanding horticultural repertoires to flooding, salinisation and competition over land and water. Across both sites, they draw on intergenerational repertoires to manage urban plots through intensive routines rooted in domestic and community rhythms. These largely low tech agroecological practices maintain connections to rural food cultures under urban inequality and environmental stress, contributing to dietary diversification and partially buffering food insecurity.

The two sites are contemporary expressions of a historically connected South Atlantic food system. African staples such as rice, plantain and yam travelled from Upper Guinea to Afro-Colombian territories through the slave trade, while American crops including cassava, maize, beans and peanuts moved into Upper Guinea. Our ethnographic work in urban gardens in Medellín and Bissau shows continued shared horticultural practices adapted to dense urban settings and ecological pressures. Recognising women’s urban horticulture as heritage based innovation shifts food security agendas beyond technocentric and Western models towards more context responsive, gender equitable visions of agrarian futures for African and Latin American cities.