Key findings:

This report offers a critical lens on the innovation systems shaping agriculture and whose consequences ripple across the entire food system. It examines how agricultural innovation is being defined, whose interests are shaping dominant narratives, and which pathways are being promoted – or sidelined – as a result. It ultimately asks: what kind of innovation systems do we need to meaningfully support sustainable and equitable food and agricultural systems?

As illustrated in Figure 1, the report shows that powerful new alliance between Big Tech corporations (including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alibaba) and Big Ag firms is rapidly gaining control of farming under the guise of innovation. These Big Tech titans are providing cloud platforms and AI-driven decision tools being integrated into all parts of industrial agriculture, from seeds to chemical inputs to machinery. As a result, they are shaping what technologies are developed, how food production decisions are made, and what the future of farming looks like.

The report shows that corporate-led digitalization of agriculture is failing to deliver ecological resilience, equity, or sustainability. Control over data is becoming a new source of power and profit in agriculture. 

At the same time, often hidden from view, farmers, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities are pioneering real innovations from the ground up. From ecological pest management approaches to peasant seed systems, these innovation systems are already delivering tangible benefits for climate resilience, biodiversity, livelihoods, and local economies. 

Yet these innovation systems are systematically undervalued and underfunded. Public R&D, regulatory frameworks, and investment flows overwhelmingly favour corporate-led innovation models, sidelining approaches that are better aligned with farmers’ realities and ecological resilience.

Structure of the report:

In Sections 1-3, the report considers three common agricultural production-related challenges shared by farmers around the world and around which innovation efforts are often centered: 1) innovations to ensure soil health – remote sensing and manual tools; 2) Innovations to protect crop from pests and disease - precision spraying technologies and ecological pest management; 3) innovations to ensure climate adaptation and resilience - gene-edited seeds and peasant seed system.

For each challenge, it examines two different types of agricultural innovations being put forward: one that has gained political and financial traction today and one already widely used around the world, but that is often overlooked by mainstream approaches.

In each case, the report asks which actors are promoting them and what their impacts are. The five dimensions for its analysis include:

• Ecological sustainability: How does it affect ecosystem health, (agro) biodiversity, and/or climate resilience?
• Equity, livelihoods, and labour: Who benefits from innovation, who bears the risk and whose labour does it rely on?
• Autonomy and control: Who owns, controls, and governs the innovation?
• Knowledge and skills: How does the innovation impact how learning and knowledge exchange occur?
• Implications for power: How does the innovation pathway both reflect and influence policy decisions and the distribution of power in food systems?

In Section 4, the report highlights levers for strengthening the innovation systems able to foster more equitable, sustainable, and resilient food systems, with key principles and actors illustrated on the next figure.

Recommendations:

Bringing together these actors and principles, the report outlines four sets of recommendations to enable innovation systems to foster more equitable, sustainable, and resilient food systems.

1. Strengthening public policy for responsible and just innovation:
   1. Protect and place the rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, farmers and farmworkers at the heart of innovation development and food system transformation;
   2. Uphold Free, Prior, Informed Consent (FPIC) of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and farmers, including the right to recall, refuse, or withdraw from the use of technologies;
   3. Reframe national and international policy agendas to align with needs-driven and context-specific innovation development;
   4. Ensure fair income and decent livelihoods for farmers and farmworkers, and financial support so that participation in farmer-led and other participatory innovation processes is possible and a genuine choice.
   5. Establish clearer definitions and protections of public and private (e.g., farmer data) agricultural data to safeguard farmer rights and collective rights, and prevent appropriation and misuses;
   6. Explore new and support existing digital commons-based and cooperative models to ensure data is a public good ;
   7. Establish rights-based governance aligned with international agreements for the collection, storage, access, and use of genetic and biological material and data.
2. Channeling research and funding towards sustainable, bottom-up initiatives:
   1. Reorient funding and research that align with Responsible Research and Innovation principles (RRI), prioritizing participatory, farmer- and community-led innovation processes;
   2. Create dedicated funds for farmer- and community-led innovation and knowledge
   3. Redirect national and international development finance away from programs that focus solely on top-down digitalization towards bottom-up social, ecological, and technological innovation systems;
   4. Invest in public physical infrastructure for bottom-up innovations (e.g., public seed banks, local food processing facilities, tool-making workshop), including digital public infrastructure (e.g., broadband, open repositories, public data centers).
3. Breaking up the power of Big Tech and Big Ag:
   1. Enforce and expand antitrust regulations and anti-merger laws in the agrifood and technology sectors to reduce corporate concentration;
   2. Reform intellectual property rights (IPR) on seeds, machinery, (bio)digital tools, algorithms, platforms, data, and information to prevent enclosure and reduce market concentration;
   3. Divest public funding from private research and re-invest public R&D for the public good, ensuring accountability and role of different actors in science and innovation governance.
   4. Invest in transparent technological assessment processes and inclusive horizon scanning to anticipate and respond to emerging risks and changes in the agritech landscape (including the precautionary principle and the right to refuse a technology).
4. Changing the narrative on innovation:
   1. Recognize that innovation and innovation narratives are always political, shaped by specific actors, interests, and worldviews.
   2. Expose the limits of ‘technofix’ narratives (e.g., around precision agriculture, bioengineering), which frame political and social issues solely as technical problems.
   3. Make a clearer distinction in public discourse between corporate-driven digitalization or digital agriculture and digital tools that could support agroecological transitions when developed under the right conditions;
   4. Use food system transformation narratives that go beyond innovation imperatives, or use “innovation” and narratives with caution and awareness of the colonial and capitalist dynamics they risk reproducing.