Paper Short Abstract:

'Climate-smart' digital technologies such as precision agriculture are increasingly framed as a solution to decouple increased agricultural production from the sectors’ ecological footprint. This paper examines how digitalisation may be reconfiguring existing agricultural labour hierarchies.

Paper Abstract:

Drawing on political economy, political ecology, critical agrarian studies and critical data studies, and in viewing the digitalisation of food systems in the Sub-Saharan African region as an unfolding sociotechnical phenomenon inextricably linked with international-development driven green transition and sustainable goals efforts, I aim to to contribute to debates on eco-economic decoupling and green growth agendas in the climate-change agriculture nexus, exploring furthermore techno-colonial relationships involving dispossession e.g. through datafication, and data-oriented agricultural governance. The expanding agritech industry across the bifurcated South African agricultural terrain adds gravity to agrarian questions of labour, particularly the consequences of capital-led digitalisation for the reconfiguration of labour arrangements. The following paper examines how digitalisation may be dislodging and reconfiguring existing agricultural labour hierarchies and how new technologies are affecting labour conditions; through for examples risks of increased exploitation, surveillance and labour displacement as well as questions relating to socio-political implications of data ownership, profitability and governance. Furthermore, I explore alternative climate mitigation and adaptation trajectories and contestations to techno-fix and technocratic framings of agrarian development and climate change response, such as those constructed in the approaches of food sovereignty and agroecology, which, in contrast to the Climate Smart Agriculture framework, work to foreground the political dimensions of production, distribution and consumption.