Fairbairn & Kish: Politics of Open Data for Food and Agriculture
In Setting Data Free: The Politics of Open Data for Food and Agriculture, Madeleine Fairbairn (Environmental Studies, University of California Santa Cruz) and Zenia Kish (Media Studies, University of Tulsa), explore the assumptions and values underlying the promotion of open data in the context of food security and agricultural development. This exploration is conducted through a document-based case study of the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative, interviews with open data practitioners, and participant observations at open data events.
GODAN is one of many movements seeking to expand the use of open data in food and agriculture. Open data, which emerged in the 1980s as a software movement, refers to data anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose. The goal of the initial open access movement was to create a common pool of scientific knowledge, allowing for citizen interpretation of research, increasing government transparency and accountability, and empowering the individual. In open agri-food data, this meant technological innovations to boost agricultural yields and initiatives such as the United States Open Source Seed Initiative, which releases seed varietals.
Fairbairn and Kish argue that the dynamics of open agri-food data politics now instead risk deepening the structural inequalities that lie at the root of the problems open agri-food data movements aim to solve. These problems are apparent in GODAN publications that ultimately reveal an anti-political, trickle-down vision of open data that serves Global North values. This furthers the divides between the Global North and South by enacting structures of data colonialism, where development institutions and agribusinesses intensify data extraction while embedding their own values within universalizing information infrastructures. Doing so eliminates important context in agri-food data by creating oversimplification of data. For instance, local names for crops or soil that are rooted in the day-to-day lived experience of farmers and steeped in cultural association may lose some of their meaning as they become associated with the broad categories used in more universalized open-data categorization.
Noting that this article explores open agri-food data as understood by development industry actors, the authors encourage future researchers to explore how farmers and other beneficiaries experience diverse open data initiatives.
