Paper short abstract:

At the crossroads of STS, sociology of agriculture, and political economy, this communication analyzes the power dynamics and the logistical governance underlying a digital platform developed by French wheat value chain actors to visualize and manage wheat flows at the national scale.

Paper long abstract:

Like other commodities such as oil, wheat logistics is strongly entangled with political and economic power: acting upon wheat flows (through interruption, optimization, financialization, etc.) has immediate consequences on food security, geopolitical stability, and global markets. Nowadays, wheat logistics is going through digitization processes, to optimize efficiency and increase competitiveness with algorithms and data. Among the French wheat sector, value chain actors recently started to develop digital platforms to visualize and manage wheat flows. Those technologies are at the crossroads of former tools producing technical information on wheat, and new capabilities aiming at forecasting wheat characteristics through algorithms and data. At the crossroads of STS, sociology of commodities, and political economy, this presentation investigates the following questions: Does digitization implement a new politics for wheat flows? What type of power dynamics inside the wheat logistics value chain does this digitization entail? This presentation relies on interviews and observations with businesses managing silos on the port of Rouen, cooperatives, scientific experts, and the French crop value chain. It stands that digitization makes visible already-establised power relations between actors of the crop logistics value chain, but also challenges them through new capabilities given to some actors.