Somewhere between convenience, efficiency, cost saving and a comprehensive EU surveillance mega state, the use of drones and other in-the-sky technologies for ensuring CAP compliance represents, as it were, a Brave New World. 

Helene Schulze: Imagine annual farm audits performed not by EU regulators pacing the fields and talking through the details with farmers but by gently buzzing machines flying overhead, measuring, photographing, assessing compliance to CAP rules and regulations. Whether this image inspires excitement or apprehension has divided opinion in Europe. How have AgTech tools like satellite mapping, remote sensing and drones been implemented in measuring CAP compliance? What are the concerns?

The EU spends almost half of its annual budget on agricultural subsidies, around €59 billion a year.These subsidies are allocated on a two-pillar basis; the first, a basic payment per hectare of agricultural land and the second funds based on voluntary agri-environmental service provision. A form of compensation for farmers, they encourage the maintenance of hedge rows, buffer strips and meadows, the limitation of fertiliser use and adherence to crop rotation plans, for example.

With such vast spending comes the necessity to ensure taxpayer funds are allocated fairly and accurately. High-tech data collection devices such as satellite mapping and drones are a way of doing this. Ray Purdy, Senior Research Fellow in environmental law at the University of Oxford, told me ‘almost all EU countries now use satellite technology, which can produce accurate maps of the size of agricultural parcels (ensuring farmers are only claiming subsidies for genuine farmland), and to check if claimants are complying with certain environmental conditions attached to subsidies.’

Since 1988, the Monitoring of Agriculture and Remote Sensing (MARS) programme has used satellite mapping to measure CAP compliance. Adherence assessment is the responsibility of each member state which must establish a paying agency to perform checks and audits. EU law stipulates that each year at least 5% of all farms must be audited.

In 2012, around 70% of these required inspections performed by satellites, Purdy notes. Primarily, this is a money-saving strategy: satellites are able to cover vast swathes of land in little time. Satellite monitoring a farm costs around a third the price of sending a regulator.

Additionally, Purdy said when queried, ‘they can make farmers happier, if they provide a level playing field i.e. if they know there is less chance of others breaking the law, they don’t have to because they’re not being put in a disadvantageous competitive position.’

As mentioned in a previous Arc2020 article, AgTech hardware is being employed by many farmers across the continent as part of their own farm management strategies. The European Commission supports these efforts, arguing that ‘technological development and digitisation make possible big leaps in resource efficiency enhancing an environment and climate smart agriculture, which reduce the environment-/climate impact of farming, increase resilience and soil health and decrease costs for farmers.’

A question submitted by NABU representative at recent Agriculture and Food Summit, 30th November Paris. Interestingly, Tobias Menne global head of digital farming at Bayer, who was on the panel on digital farming at the time, thought this would be a very bad idea, in terms of farmer trust. Photo (c) Oliver Moore

However, farms that tend to incorporate such AgTech tools currently are large agri-businesses. I asked Chris Henderson from NGO Practical Action about this scale and affordability issue: ‘new hardware such as drones and robots are unlikely to be within the financial reach of smallholders…they are more likely to find application in high-potential commercial areas with better off farmers. One thing that needs careful consideration at the macro level is the negative effects intensive agriculture (driven by new technologies) might have on the poor – perhaps displacing them from their land or out-competing with them for water.’

Image: Gavin Whitner (CC BY 2.0) http://musicoomph.com/

This points to a divergence in access and response to AgTech. Perhaps, if farmers are not employing drones, robots and satellite imagery on their own land, they may appear more critical of auditing bodies doing the same.  Since member states are responsible for their own compliance assessments, there has been some variance in the types of technologies and strategies of inspection, as well as responses to these across the continent. A 2008 study by Ray Purdy found that a third of farmers were opposed to satellite monitoring in the UK, where it has been used to combat subsidy fraud for over a decade. In his interviews with farmers Purdy found that many ‘made reference to ‘1984’ and ‘Big Brother’ and were concerned that the satellite would be ‘peeping’ or ‘spying’ on them.’

These are natural concerns. For one, with a human inspector one at least knows when the assessment is taking place whereas satellite monitoring gives no such indication. Farmers are unaware when they are undergoing an inspection. There are also questions to be raised about who has access to the collected data. This is powerful information, information which could give some farmers a competitive advantage. With the potential implementation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in CAP compliance testing, these concerns are heightened further. Drones can get a lot closer to the target, taking sharper photographs. Farms are also homes on private land and such inspection could be very intrusive. Whilst UAVs are being explored in the agricultural context and there are pilot projects across Europe, they have yet to be included in CAP monitoring.

When queried, Vicki Hird, food and farming policy coordinator at Sustain, argued that ‘there’s certainly a lot of potential here both in measuring compliance but also from the perspective of the farmers and workers as part of a sustainable farming strategy to assess needs and review progress on land. It can help bring the whole farming community into understanding about how nature and farming should work together on a whole farm basis.’ So, AgTech tools must be incorporated into other governance and management strategies which bring people together rather than alienate them which would risk farmers feeling observed from a distant, invisible body reading to subject penalties.

Purdy reiterates this call for the maintenance of human interaction in farm auditing; ‘if a machine is doing the monitoring it provides less contact between the farmer and the regulator, which might also be an opportunity to discuss other farming issues. Sometimes human contact can be important.’

Irrespective of these fears, CAP auditing will likely become only more technology-dominated in the years to come. Key is to consider in which frameworks such technology can be used to support farmers and prevent feelings of alienation and constant surveillance. Theoretically if collected data were made publicly available, small farmers could begin to benefit from AgTech developments currently too expensive for their own use. Through open-source initiatives, they could have access to information about their land currently only accessible to wealthy agri-businesses. It is also possible to collectively own and manage technologies, as the extensive CUMA machinery co-ops in France show. Again, for this to work these developments must be thought through thoroughly in consultation with farmers. Moreover, the delivery of any such tech should involve farmers – not so much as inspected from the sky, but, rather, as participants in the process of verifying their own management techniques.

It is also interesting to explore how these technologies might impact the relationships between companies, environmental NGOs, regulators and farmers: if Bayer sound more farmer-concerned than NABU, as the example from the politico event referenced in the image above suggests, we are in strange territory. And if farmers are ignored it is unlikely that such auditing technologies will receive widespread support in a climate of concern over an increasingly intrusive surveillance state.

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Deals between companies and governments working together to automate acceptable content online are too common. Whilst content filtering is being proposed in EU copyright law, in other situations it’s all wrapped up in a closed door agreement. 

Ruth Coustick-Deal, writing for OpenMedia.org lays out the “shadow regulation” complementing the dubious legal propositions which are being drafted to curtail sharing.

Ruth Coustick-Deal: As the excitement over using automation and algorithms in tech to “disrupt” daily life grows, so too does governments’ desire to use it to solve social problems. They hope “automation” will disrupt piracy, online harassment, and even terrorism.

This is particularly true in the case of deploying automated bots for content moderation on the web. These autonomous programs are designed to detect certain categories of posts, and then take-down or block them without any human intervention.

In the last few weeks:

1)The UK Government have announced they have developed an algorithmic tool to remove ISIS presence from the web.
2) Copyright industries have called for similar programs to be installed that can remove un-approved creative content in the United States.
3) The European Commission has suggested that filters can be used to “proactively detect, identify, and remove” anything illegal – from comments sections on news sites to Facebook posts.
4) The Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, currently being debated by MEPs, is proposing using technical filters to block copyrighted content from being posted.

There’s a recklessness to all of these proposals – because so much of them involve sidestepping legal processes.

EFF coined the term “shadow regulation” for rules that are made outside of the legislative process, and that’s what is happening here. A cosy relationship between business and governments has developed that the public are being left outside of when it comes to limiting online speech.

Let’s take a look at Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s anti-terrorist propaganda tool. She claims it can identify “94% of IS propaganda with 99.995% accuracy.” Backed up by this amazingly bold claim, the UK Government want to make the tool available to be installed on countless platforms across the web (including major platforms like Vimeo and YouTube) which would be able to detect, and then remove such content. However, it’s likely to be in some form of unofficial “agreement”, rather than legislation that is scrutinised by parliament.

Similarly, in the European Commission’s communication on automating blocking illegal content, our friends at EDRi point out, “the draft reminds readers – twice – that the providers have “contractual freedom”, meaning that… safeguards will be purely optional.”

If these programs are installed without the necessary public debate, a legal framework, or political consensus – then who will they be accountable to? Who is going to be held responsible for censorship of the wrong content? Will it be the algorithm makers? Or the platforms that utilise them? How will people object to the changes?

Even when these ideas have been introduced through legal mechanisms they still give considerable powers to the platforms themselves. For example, the proposed copyright law we have been campaigning on through Save the Link prevents content from being posted that was simply identified by the media industry – not what is illegal.

The European Commission has suggested using police to tell the companies when a post, image, or video is illegal. There is no consideration of using courts – who elsewhere are the ones who make calls about justice. Instead we are installing systems that bypass the rule of law, with only vague gestures towards due process.

Governments are essentially ignoring their human rights obligations by putting private companies in charge. Whether via vague laws or back-room agreements, automated filtering is putting huge amounts of power in the hands of a few companies, who are getting to decide what restrictions are appropriate.

The truth is, the biggest platforms on the web already have unprecedented control over what gets published online. These platforms have become public spaces, where we go to communicate with one another. With these algorithms however, there is an insidious element of control that the owners of the platforms have over us. We should be trying to reduce the global power of these companies, rather than hand over the latest tools for automated censorship to use freely.

It’s not just the handing over of power that is problematic. Once something has been identified by police or by the online platform as “illegal,” governments argue that it should never be seen again.  What if that “illegal” content is being shown for criticism or news-worthy commentary? Should a witness to terrorism be censored for showing the situation to the world? Filters make mistakes. They cannot become our gods.

Content moderation is one of the trickiest subjects being debated by digital rights experts and academics at the moment. There have been many articles written, many conferences on the subject, and dozens of papers that have tried to consider how we can deal with the volumes of content on the web – and the horrific examples that surfact.

It is without a doubt that however content moderation happens online, there must be transparency. It must be specified in law what exactly gets blocked. And the right to free expression must be considered.

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Cooperatives Europe commends the ’s recognition of the growing interest for the cooperative model in the collaborative economy. This positioning sends a positive signal towards actors shaping a more diverse and inclusive collaborative economy.

On 15th of June 2017, the European Parliament adopted its resolution on the “European Agenda for the collaborative economy”, following the European Commission guidance released on 2 June 2016. The document, which includes proposals from Cooperatives Europe, recognizes the potential of the collaborative economy which, “if developed in a responsible manner”, may contribute to the creation of new opportunities for citizens, consumers and workers.

Cooperatives Europe welcomes the acknowledgement of “a growing interest in the collaborative economy based on cooperative business models”, as well as “the importance of identifying and addressing barriers to the emergence of collaborative businesses, especially start-ups”. It also recognizes the development of a community-based collaborative economy “in which knowledge and education sharing models are strong, thereby catalyzing and consolidating a culture of open innovation.”

The aim to make the collaborative economy a leverage for an economic system “not only more efficient, but also socially and environmentally sustainable” echoes a growing entrepreneurial dynamic across Europe. Cooperative examples include business models enabling democratic control over collaborative services (platform cooperatives) and anticipating the mutation of work (freelancer cooperatives). Cooperatives Europe’s paper “Cooperative Platforms in a European Landscape: An Exploratory Study,” explores potentials, barriers and diversity of such initiatives.

Agnès Mathis, Director of Cooperatives Europe, commented: “Thanks to a long tradition of solidarity and social innovation, the European continent has seen the emergence of a patchwork of cooperative start-ups, which together shape a collaborative economy empowering its users and generating benefits for local communities. We look forward to work further with EU institutions and policy-makers to create an ambitious enabling environment for a people-centered, responsible collaborative economy.”

Related content

• Cooperative Platforms in a European Landscape: An Exploratory Study
• Video: Collaborative economy… what is it?
• European Commission: A European Agenda for the collaborative economy
• Nesta: More than profit: a collaborative economy with a social purpose

Photo by Michal Sänger

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Cities and Technological Sovereignty 6 – The Gig Economy Needs To Meet Its Responsibilities

(13 mins) Wolfgang Kowalsky – The ‘gig economy’ may sound cool but in reality many of the jobs offer a fast route back to the problems faced by day laborers of 100 years ago. The gig economy needs to grow up and meet its responsibilities to workers by turning undeclared work into declared work. Online platforms have the effect, if not the intent, of disguising the employment relationship along with facilitating avoidance of social security and tax obligations. The European Commission must stop giving an alibi for these arrangements. What about fair play? Is there a level playing field between new and old service providers when a 3-star hotel in Spain has to comply with 244 rules whereas “sharing” properties have only 12 rules to deal with? Digitalization‘s false promises for a better world need to be addressed. The future of work must be fair digital work.

Photo by mag3737

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We believe that on the part of government institutions it is time to define and advance the promotion of viable production and entrepreneurship alternatives, ones that fulfill the conditions for transparency and open resources as an engine of real progress, resilience and multiplication of opportunities. It is time for governments to act and stop the enclosure of knowledge and digital commons.

If you enjoyed our in-depth report on Procomuns (the Commons Collaborative Economy event held in Barcelona last March), you’ll surely be interested in the set of European Commission policy proposals put together by our colleagues at Barcola and Dimmons with support of the P2Pvalue project. We have transfered these recommendations to the Commons Transition Wiki, so they can be easily consulted or commented on. Alternatively, you can download the PDF’s linked below.

The main objective of the Commons Collaborative Economies is to discuss the potential and the challenges of the collaborative economy, but also to define public policies that could help to promote the “Commons side” of the collaborative economy.

Following the discussions at the first international event we organized on March 2016, which gathered more than 400 participants, we have been working together experts, citizens and sector representatives on a series of proposals and more than 120 policy recommendations for governments, ending in a joint statement of public policies for the collaborative economy.

The measures (in Catalan) have been sent to the Barcelona City Council as concrete actions for the Municipal Action Plan of the City following a consultative online participatory process. The Declaration has been sent to other local authorities and the Government of Catalonia. This version of the Declaration in English has also been sent to the European Commission and various General Directorates which are currently working on the regulation of the collaborative economy. A version in Spanish has also been sent to various institutional authorities.

Following new and open sessions we will continue encouraging the debate and the development of new versions of the declaration and of useful resources.

Executive summary of the document, with the 10 policy proposals which received more support.