The ongoing farmer protests against the proposed farm laws rest on a few core arguments—one among them is the claim that corporates would receive an upper hand over the poor farmer if these bills are passed.

Interestingly, in a recent move Amazon began providing agro-advice to Indian farmers through a mobile app—the programme, called “Reactive and Proactive Crop plans”, claims to bring cutting-edge technology, and data backed insights to growers.

As the saying goes—“he who controls the data, controls the narrative.” Amazon has for long been at the top of the data game, rivalling top social media platforms. That said, its plans to enter the Indian agriculture space are in all probability not sinister, but the absence of the protesting farmer is a surprise.

The Connection

Recently, the e-commerce space saw considerable consolidation—Tata Group acquired Big Basket and Walmart acquired Flipkart. Reliance Industries had entered the game much earlier and is now among the largest players. Amazon’s entry into a saturated-but-growing market signals the industry’s dependency on controlling agricultural supply chains, which e-commerce businesses can leverage against logistical advantages, and ultimately, cut costs.

However, for large corporations to wield any significant influence (positive or negative) over the ailing agriculture sector and profit from it, laws that guard the high gates to agricultural markets must be dismantled with immediate effect.

Vested interests with large piles of cash have substantial control over government policy, even in countries where lobbies are illegal. Amazon’s plans to provide alerts and address soil, pests, weather, disease, and other crop-related queries are not aimed at helping farmers, but at bringing efficiency in a sector that is severely inefficient. Farmer-help is simply a by-product. The idea is not new—NGOs, start-ups, and governments already run many digital programs in this regard—but the efficiency and drive that Amazon brings with it holds promise.

The Questions

The questions are two – can increasing corporate interest in making agriculture efficient lead to a change in farmer sentiment against proposed farm laws? Two, is this necessarily good?

Reasons to support a yes on the first count are reasonable. However, corporations dictating what is good for the farmer and what isn’t, can be dangerous—Amazon, with its machine learning-guns pointed at higher productivity, might suggest solutions to farmers that are not necessarily the best for the soil in the long run. Its vested interests and biases might lead to unhealthy farming practices—for instance, trying to increase the shelf-life of farm produce through unnatural ways, instead of promoting local and faster consumption of perishable goods.

In an industry that is trying hard (and failing harder) to move towards healthier production practices, this should have been seen with some caution. But it seems the protesting farmers are not theorists; and what happens next could go either way.