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Digital agriculture will perpetuate injustice unless led from the grassroots

Nature Food volume 6, pages 312–315 (2025)Cite this article

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Situating digital agriculture within recent histories of uneven agrarian development reveals its potential to perpetuate injustice. To avoid this outcome, we argue for innovation processes that centre the needs, knowledge and priorities of communities who work the land.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Madeleine Fairbairn & Maywa Montenegro de Wit

  2. Department of Society and Conservation, University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA

    Hilary Oliva Faxon

  3. School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Kelly Bronson & Sarah-Louise Ruder

  4. Communication and Digital Media Studies, Ontario Tech University, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada

    Zenia Kish

  5. Human Rights Research and Education Centre, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Jane Ezirigwe

  6. Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Selamawit Abdella

  7. Centre for Law, Technology and Society, Faculty of Law (Common Law Section), University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Chidi Oguamanam

  8. Department of International Development Studies, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Matthew A. Schnurr

Authors
  1. Madeleine Fairbairn
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  2. Hilary Oliva Faxon
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  3. Maywa Montenegro de Wit
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  4. Kelly Bronson
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  5. Zenia Kish
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  6. Sarah-Louise Ruder
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  7. Jane Ezirigwe
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  8. Selamawit Abdella
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  9. Chidi Oguamanam
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  10. Matthew A. Schnurr
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Madeleine Fairbairn.

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Competing interests

H.O.F. received funding from Facebook Research to conduct research on digital literacy, demographics and misinformation in Myanmar. Facebook had no control, oversight or involvement in the research process and did not review the results. This source of funding did not affect the study’s findings or analysis. S.-L.R. has unpaid advisory roles with LiteFarm (since 2020) and OpenTEAM (since 2022). Nonetheless the views expressed here are those of the authors and not of these organizations. The other authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Food thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Fairbairn, M., Faxon, H.O., Montenegro de Wit, M. et al. Digital agriculture will perpetuate injustice unless led from the grassroots. Nat Food 6, 312–315 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-025-01137-8

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