Declaration: Pan-African Convening on The Future of Biodigital Technologies in Food and Agriculture

We, participants of the First Pan-African Convening on the Future of Biodigital Technologies in Food and Agriculture, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from 2–4 October 2025, and co-organized by the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) and African Technology Assessment Platform (AfriTAP) and the ETC Group, gathered in a landmark event to confront the challenges and possibilities posed by emerging digital technologies.

This historic convening brought together over 130 participants from 33 African countries, representing farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, women, youth, faith-based communities, scientists, policy makers, lawyers, consumers, Indigenous peoples, civil society organizations, and social movements.

Together, we reaffirmed our unwavering commitment to defend the sovereignty, dignity, and resilience of African food systems against extractive and corporate-driven digitalization.

Introduction

African food movements have long confronted colonial legacies and neoliberal agendas that shape our food, land, seed, water, and agricultural systems. The imposition of foreign technologies has played a central role in facilitating the extraction of African resources—from the colonial cash crop economy to the Green Revolution to the contemporary extraction of minerals to fuel the current artificial intelligence frenzy—to benefit the hands of a few.

For decades our grassroots communities have mobilized to defend our food systems. In doing so, we have developed an alternative vision based on community, care, collective agency and biodiversity. We have innovated and cultivated agroecological systems on the ground, built community seed banks and indigenous local seed and food systems, and mobilized a Pan-African solidarity movement united in the goal of realising food sovereignty on the continent.

Today, the convergence of biology and digital technologies—artificial intelligence (AI), synthetic biology, robotics, sensors, data platforms, genomics, lab-grown proteins, 3D printed foods, and geoengineering—represents a new conjunction of technological, geopolitical, and epistemic power and our relationship with the living world. While these technologies are promoted under the guise of innovation, rural development, efficiency, and climate resilience, they are neither neutral nor universally beneficial. They carry impacts shaped by power relations that determine who owns, who controls, and who benefits from these technologies.

For Africa, these technologies present stark risks: corporate capture of genetic resources and data, ecological exploitation, massive use of energy and water with very serious climate emissions and damaging extraction of minerals, increased government surveillance, land and water grabs, deskilling of small farmers, erosion of traditional and indigenous knowledge, and exclusion of women and youth. Together these technologies are poised to deepen existing inequalities. This convening analyzed these realities and charted a united Pan-African response grounded in African knowledge systems, justice, agroecology, and food sovereignty.

Synthesis Of Discussions

Throughout the convening, we engaged in an analysis of the nature of biodigitalization and its implications for African food systems. Plenary discussions exposed how artificial intelligence and digital platforms replicate colonial patterns of extraction and surveillance. Africa’s rich mineral resources are also expropriated to fuel the current push for artificial intelligence, dispossessing farmers and communities of their land leaving, their lands and water polluted.

Warnings were raised about the ecological costs of massive data centers, the environmental justice impacts of mining, the risks of surveillance via biometric-based subsidy programs, the digitization and patenting of indigenous seeds and livestock genetics—termed “biopiracy 2.0”—and the deepening of debt cycles and dependency through digital credit platforms that are turning farmers into “digital sharecroppers.”

We examined the role of agroecology and indigenous knowledge in a digital era and the challenges they pose to justice and inclusivity in digital food economies. We also reviewed the policies, governance frameworks, and emerging regulatory infrastructures that are facilitating the corporate capture of data. Across these spaces, common themes emerged: the urgent need for collective control over data, genetic resources, and digital infrastructures.

Core Messages

Technologies are not neutral; they reflect and reproduce systems of power. The artificial intelligence industry is emerging as an imperial force. Africa must not be a testing ground for corporate-driven biodigitalization.

At the same time, we recognize that digital technologies hold opportunities to connect movements, strengthen local and territorial markets, and support farmer-to-farmer knowledge sharing.

However, we reject the narrative that digitalization technologies are a silver bullet. Instead, emerging technologies should be used only where they can advance food sovereignty and agroecology, which must be the foundation of Africa’s future in a digital era.

We affirm the need for technologies for non-extractive technologies co-created with communities and firmly anchored in human rights.

Data justice and seed sovereignty are non-negotiable rights of farmers and communities. Pan-African solidarity and South–South collaboration are essential to resist corporate capture. Grassroots innovation must be prioritized over imposed “high-tech” fixes.

Call to Action

We, the participants of the Pan-African Convening on the Future of Biodigital Technologies in Food and Agriculture, call upon:

African Governments to:

• Develop policies and measures to support agroecological food systems;
• Ensure farmer privacy and enable farmers control over farm data;
• Protect plant genetic resources and respect communities’ seed sovereignty;
• Provide transparent information about partnership with the private sector;
• Ensure the inclusion and democratic participation of vulnerable groups, such as youth and women, in decision-making spaces related to digitalization.

African Union & Regional Bodies to:

• Integrate agroecology in continental strategies;
• Develop frameworks for digital governance rooted in the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and African values such as Ubuntu;
• Develop infrastructure at the continental level to ensure Africa’s digital sovereignty;
• Revise and develop robust biosafety frameworks that take into account the risks posed by new emerging technologies and convergence with AI.

Civil Society and social movements to:

• Create awareness of the potential harms of digital technologies and sensitize local populations to data extraction;
• Strengthen participation in regional platforms of technology assessment such as Africa Technology Assessment Platform (AfriTAP);
• Promote grassroots innovation, support farmer-led seed banks, and amplify agroecology and indigenous knowledge as foundations for Africa’s agricultural and food systems;
• Build collective power against harmful technologies;
• Increase advocacy at governance structures at local, national, and regional levels to develop data protection and governance frameworks that protect privacy, collective rights, and local innovation;
• Build alliances between food sovereignty movements, environmental justice movements, land rights movements, and digital justice and rights movements to consolidate our struggles against extractive AI models, data mining, and geoengineering;
• As African CSOs we express full support for the July 2025 AMCEN20 decisions by all African ministers to reject solar geoengineering and their call for establishment of an international solar geoengineering Non-Use Agreement that would ban deployment, public funding, outdoor experimentation, patenting or support in international organizations for these unacceptable technologies;
• Develop bottom-up, gender- and youth-sensitive methodologies for technology assessment for social movements and local communities;
• Promote community-based alternative data governance mechanisms.

Corporations, philanthropies and international institutions to:

• Respect Africa’s sovereignty;
• Support people-centered, agroecological approaches.