April 12, 2021

ANIMATION Big Brother is Coming to the Farm: The digital takeover of food

In collaboration with Freehand Studio in Nairobi, we’re launching 'Big Brother is Coming to the Farm: the digital takeover of food', an animation about the #BattleForTheFutureOfFood.
An illustration of a cow standing next to a high-tec farm house

Giant corporations are driving significant and far-reaching changes in agriculture, food processing and retail all over the world. In collaboration with Freehand Studio in Nairobi, we’re launching 'Big Brother is Coming to the Farm: the digital takeover of food', an animation about the #BattleForTheFutureOfFood. It challenges the dominant industrial techno-fix narrative being promoted by the Food Systems Summit process and holds up food sovereignty and agroecology as an alternative.

It reveals that giant agribusiness firms like Bayer, Corteva Agriscience, Syngenta Group and BASF, are now being joined by other equally powerful corporations from outside the food world who want to shape the food system to serve their interests. These include giant asset management companies that most people have barely heard of, such as Blackrock, who have been buying up shares in the world of food and agriculture and gaining enormous influence over their future development. 

Big Finance and Big Tech companies also want farming to go online and all sorts of things are in the pipeline. The food system is full of things that can be turned into data for data giants to harvest – there's DNA in the seeds, water and soil data on farms, data about moving commodities from field to factory to the dinner table, and of course, all the grocery sales and consumer data.

Big Brother is currently available in English, French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Swahili. It’s a serious story, but we hope you enjoy it!

Big Brother is Coming to the Farm: the digital takeover of food (English) https://youtu.be/snYD7X3edMs

El Gran hermano llega al campo: asalto digital a la alimentación (español) https://youtu.be/-8j2vIYnrr8

Big Brother arrive à la ferme : la mainmise du numérique sur notre alimentation (en français) https://youtu.be/Rx2bQKLt50I

Makampuni Makubwa Yanakuja Kuteka Mashamba: utekaji dijitali wa biashara ya vyakula (Swahili) https://youtu.be/FOZeETw9Pw0

Il 'Grande Fratello' nei campi: L'assalto 'digitale' al cibo (sottotitoli) https://youtu.be/snYD7X3edMs

ビッグブラザーがやってくるー私たちの食を襲う見えない脅威ー https://youtu.be/NJd3CaMWxrU

Bung Besar Datang ke Pertanian: Pengambilalihan Digital Pangan (Bahasa Indonesia) https://youtu.be/ouHgxshzxZg

Contact the artists: www.freehandmovement.com or @freehandstudioske

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