How Does Power Shape Food Technology? Scripts, Imaginaries, and Corporate Power in the Case of Agricultural Drones in West Bengal

Tanha Kate

No jqfg3_v2, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Digital agriculture is frequently presented as a neutral technological solution to the intertwined challenges of food security, sustainability, and agricultural productivity. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), this paper argues instead that digital agricultural technologies embody particular distributions of power through their design, data infrastructures, and underlying sociotechnical imaginaries. Using Syngenta's introduction of pesticide-spraying drones to smallholder farmers in West Bengal, India, as a case study, I examine how corporate incentives shape both the technologies that are developed and the agricultural futures they seek to make possible. Integrating classical STS concepts - including scripts, interpretative flexibility, technological closure, infrastructure, and sociotechnical imaginaries - with recent scholarship on agricultural data governance and platformization, I argue that the commercial value of drones lies not only in their capacity to automate pesticide application but also in the agricultural data they generate, creating new forms of dependence between farmers and agribusiness. While drones are promoted through narratives of efficiency, sustainability, and feeding a growing global population, the empirical evidence for their benefits to smallholder farmers remains mixed when weighed against constraints of affordability, infrastructure, and unequal control over data. By situating the West Bengal case alongside historical precedents including the mechanical tomato harvester, the Green Revolution, and genetically modified crops in Africa, the paper identifies recurring patterns through which corporate and state actors privilege capital-intensive technological solutions while marginalizing smallholder priorities. It concludes that power in digital agriculture operates not only through markets but through the ability to shape technological design, govern data, and define the futures that agricultural innovation is imagined to secure.

Date: 2026-07-03
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:jqfg3_v2

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/jqfg3_v2

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