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Data Governance for Equitable and Sustainable Digital Food Systems

Project description

Data governance for sustainable agriculture

Digitalisation in agriculture enables extensive data collection from diverse sources to address food insecurity and climate change. However, unequal access to this data can exacerbate power imbalances. Effective data governance is essential but challenging, particularly because many existing models are not suited to the Global South. The ERC-funded DIGIFOOD project will examine agricultural data governance in Colombia, India, and Kenya (leading countries in agricultural digitalisation in the Global South). The project will analyse the legal and cultural dimensions of data governance and provide insights into how digitalisation is reshaping agrarian relationships, with a focus on power dynamics. Ultimately, the project aims to support the development of governance standards for sustainable digitalisation in agriculture.

Objective

"Across the world, digitalization has been heralded as the start of a new ""agricultural revolution."" Data collected from digital sensors implanted into soil, satellites, and mobile phones offer the possibility of gathering unprecedented amounts of data. Combined with predictive analytics of artificial intelligence, this data promises critical insights for governments, food producers, and the private sector to address the challenges of food insecurity and climate change. Yet with these new flows of data also come risks. Unequal capacity to collect and extract value from data can exacerbate structural power asymmetries in food systems, with important implications for human rights. To mitigate these risks, it is essential to establish robust data governance, itself no easy task. Agricultural data defy the legal categories that have guided data protection in other sectors. Moreover, most models of agricultural data governance have been developed in the Global North and may not be fit for the Global South, where smallholders make up the majority of food producers. This project, Data Governance for Equitable and Sustainable Digital Food Systems (DIGIFOOD), examines these emerging networks and practices of agricultural data governance through a transnational, comparative, and cross-national study of three countries leading agricultural digitalization and governance in the Global SouthKenya, India, and Colombia. The project breaks new ground by developing an innovative socio-legal and ethnographic approach for analyzing the technical, legal, and cultural dimensions of data governance. It will offer empirical insights into the impact of digitalization on agrarian relations, shedding light on struggles over power and authority within the context of the digital agricultural revolution. By doing so, it aims to make a substantial contribution to the normative evolution of governance standards to enable equitable and sustainable digitization of agriculture and food systems."

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG

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Host institution

UNIVERSITEIT LEIDEN
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 998 860,00
Address
RAPENBURG 70
2311 EZ Leiden
Netherlands

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Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 998 860,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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