Agrarian Platform Capitalism: Digital Rentiership Comes to Farming

Abstract

With the rise of digital technologies, a political-economic configuration recognised as “platform capitalism” has raised concerns over monopolistic tendencies, lack of accountability, expanded rentiership, workers’ precarity, and more. Existing analyses, however, show a distinctly urban bias—centring on housing, transportation, retail, and gig labour—and have yet to engage with the agrarian dimensions of this phenomenon despite considerable potential impacts on the future of farming. Here we begin the process of theorising agrarian platform capitalism, offering a typology of platforms in the agri-food sector, and bringing together critiques of platform capitalism with the distinctive features of agrarian political economy. Our analysis identifies four prominent characteristics of agrarian platform capitalism which largely corroborate existing critiques albeit with some distinctive contours. As in other sectors, platforms intensify rentiership regarding both real estate and digital assets. Agricultural platforms also display a familiar tendency to thrive in spaces of regulatory retreat and are in some cases even endorsed by regulatory agencies, highlighting the potential for public–private platformisation. Some agricultural platform companies deploy populist rhetoric beyond established tropes of consumer welfare, latching onto farmers’ deep frustrations with the highly concentrated agribusiness sector. Efforts to reign in agrarian platform power may be further constrained by legitimising discourses of hunger relief and sustainability.