Spy Technology Meets Agribusiness

By Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero, CorpWatch. Posted October 21, 2002.

"Flip the tortilla" ("virar la tortilla") is a common Puerto Rican expression. It describes the act of taking someone's argument and turning it on its head. This is precisely what the biotechnology and agribusiness industries are now doing to confound their critics.

The corporations that brought us genetically modified (GM) crops fought a pitched battle against labeling and segregating their products from non-GM counterparts. Activists called for such measures because of concerns about the safety of genetically engineered foods.

Corporations countered that GM crops were perfectly safe, and that labeling and segregating them would be impractical and would create a cumbersome and prohibitively expensive regulatory apparatus.

Now, the GM corn tortilla is certainly being flipped as major biotech corporations begin to soften to activist demands to label and segregate GM crops. Far from being a sincere expression of corporate responsibility, critics say corporations are pushing for these measures in order to tighten their hold on farmers.

They charge that agribusiness hopes to extend its control over the food industry from the farm to the retail store. This unprecedented degree of corporate control will be made possible by a package of new surveillance technologies, which when put to agricultural use, are known as "precision farming."

Precision farming "benefits from the emergence and convergence of several technologies, including geographic information systems (GIS), automated machine guidance, infield and remote sensing, mobile computing, telecommunications and advanced information processing", according to GPS World magazine. The global positioning system (GPS) is a key technology used in precision farming that provides highly accurate geo-spatial information.

Which corporations are involved? Joining forces to promote precision farming are farm equipment manufacturers like John Deere, agrochemical companies like Monsanto and DowElanco, pharmaceutical/biotech companies like Rhone-Poulenc, Novartis and AstraZeneca, as well as information brokering/data management firms.

Not surprisingly, corporations with a long history of service to the military-industrial complex and intelligence agencies, like Rockwell and Lockheed Martin, are also jumping onto the precision farming bandwagon.

For example, in a 1,000-acre potato farm, aerospace behemoth Lockheed Martin can place meteorological stations that measure 13 different weather parameters every 15 minutes and telemeter the data to a computer base station.

"More than 430 gauges measure irrigation. Yield measurements are taken every three seconds during harvest. Crop quality samples are analyzed" Lockheed's promotional material boasts. What's more, "Soil is tested for 18 nutrient parameters. Microbial communities in the topsoil are studied."

The Downside

An interesting historical parallel comes to mind. Just as World War Two military contractors developed the chemicals and machinery that fueled the Green Revolution of the 1970's, precision farming is, to a large extent, an outgrowth of the space-age surveillance technologies used in the Cold War. The tight relationship between the military industries and industrial agriculture continues well into the twenty first century.

Some observers fear that these new technologies bode ill for sustainable agriculture and democratic governance, and could impose new forms of dependence on farmers. "Precision farming has less to do with mitigating agricultural pollution than with advancing industrial modes of production", according to social scientists Steven Wolf of the University of California, Berkeley and Fred Buttel of the University of Wisconsin.

Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group) Research Director Hope Shand agrees. "Precision farming is about commodification and control of information and it is among the high-tech tools that are driving the industrialization of agriculture, the loss of local farm knowledge and the erosion of farmers rights", she told CorpWatch.

"With precision farming, farmers increasingly depend on off-farm decision making to determine precise levels of inputs. For example, dictating what seed, fertilizer, chemicals, row spacing, irrigation and harvesting techniques are used, and other management requirements," Shand explained.

Precision farming seeks to legitimate and reinforce the uniformity and chemical-intensive requirements of industrial agriculture under the guise of protecting the environment and improving efficiency, according to Shand.

How it Works: Remote Sensing

Remote sensing is an important component of precision agriculture. For example, NASA is a partner in Ag 20/20, a long-range research project that involves remote sensing. A satellite-mounted sensor looks down on farm fields, distinguishing as many as 256 light wavelengths. Similar systems that work with land-based and plane-mounted sensors are also in the works.

With the right hardware, software and know-how, the precision farmer can use this spectral information to find out a crop's health status. Does it need irrigation? Is it under attack by pests? Are weeds gaining ground? Are soil nitrogen levels OK? A great number of quantifiable variables can be measured.

The use of satellites in agriculture is already a reality. The government of the southern Pacific island of Tasmania is using GPS technology on some 600 farms as part of an identity protection pilot program, which it plans to extend to all of Tasmania's farms by 2005. In Argentina, satellite surveillance is being used to catch farmers who cheat on their taxes by underreporting the size of their fields, and to prevent them from saving seed, which is illegal there.

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