One of the world’s most prominent voices on seed sovereignty and corporate power in agriculture has warned that the same logic that drove the consolidation of the global seed industry is now being replicated through artificial intelligence, digital platforms, and data systems, with a new generation of corporate actors seeking to control agriculture through information rather than chemistry.
Pat Mooney made the argument in Episode 26 of The Battle for African Agriculture, a podcast hosted by Dr. Million Belay, General Coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA). The episode, the first part of a three-part series, is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and across AFSA’s social media platforms.
Mooney, a Canadian national with more than five decades of experience in international civil society, is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), co-founder and former director of ETC Group, an ambassador for the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM), and chair of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). He is a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, often called the Alternative Nobel Prize, received in 1985, the Pearson Peace Prize from Canada’s Governor General in 1998, and the American Giraffe Award. He holds honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Waterloo in Canada and the 17 Advanced Research Institutes in Mexico.
In conversation with Dr. Belay, Mooney traced a journey that began in the 1960s, when early encounters with global hunger debates led him beyond faith in development assistance toward a deeper analysis of power and inequality in food systems. Formative experiences in Sri Lanka, Kenya, and Canada exposed him to seed loss, genetic erosion, and the extent to which northern agriculture depended on genetic resources from the global south while presenting itself as self-sufficient.
He described how, from the 1970s onward, large oil, chemical, and pharmaceutical companies began acquiring seed companies and pushing intellectual property regimes designed to establish monopoly power over agriculture. The founding of the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), later renamed ETC Group in 2001, was part of the political response to that consolidation, leading to long battles over plant breeders’ rights, farmers’ rights, biopiracy, and the creation of international mechanisms on plant genetic resources.
Mooney offered a sharp reading of the Green Revolution, arguing that while it began largely as a public sector initiative, it ultimately demonstrated to corporations that agriculture could be standardised, technologised, and globalised in ways that served commercial power. That lesson, he argued, is now being applied to data, with digital agriculture platforms and artificial intelligence emerging as the newest instruments through which a handful of actors seek to reshape who controls the global food system.
The podcast series is produced with support from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and releases new episodes every Friday.
