A New Harvest: A Review of the Literature on Data Ownership Focusing on the Agricultural Sector

Abstract

The literature on data and economic rights is not vast. This is primarily because rights advocates and researchers have paid more attention to the relationship between data and privacy than between data and economic rights. In this paper we review the literature that is available with an inevitable over-reliance of certain contributions because of the paucity of directly relevant literature. We choose to focus on the application of data rights in the agricultural sector because of both the perceived value of data to farmers and, in the case of the majority of farmers in developing countries, their vulnerable position in relation to other actors in the system.