Less Is More? Securitization, Financialization, and Mistrust in Turkey's Agricultural Digitalization

Abstract

In many countries, longstanding concerns about food security, ecological sustainability, and socioeconomic stability have been intensified by climate change, leading many of them to reform their agro-food sectors. In Turkey and elsewhere, digital ‘‘smart’’ farming technologies (e.g., drones, auto-steering, GIS, smartphones, sensors, Big Data) are receiving rapid investment to increase efficiency and environmental sustainability, while addressing rural incomes. Since the Green Revolution, conventional development has linked increased productivity with standardized technological interventions like fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, and machinery. In the face of declining returns from such approaches, digital technologies offer a new approach: ‘‘less’’ and ‘‘customizable’’ technology for ‘‘more’’ yields, incomes, and ecological benefits. These techno-political interventions are transforming farmers’ practices, selfhoods and socialities, as well as human/non-human relations. This dissertation, based on 18 months of ethnographic research in Turkey, explores how farmers and stakeholders adopt, adapt, repurpose, and resist agricultural digitalization. The dissertation first examines how digital technologies aiming to prevent pest invasions are integrated into national security measures, leading to the expansion of everyday securitization into agrarian environments. Then it focuses on how customization technologies in agriculture are introducing new dynamics of mistrust, corporate dominance, and inequalities in agrarian landscapes. Finally, the dissertation examines how efforts to address soil infertility through regenerative farming entails novel practices of financialization in agrarian environments.