Navarro, California

The Decentralized Food Web, or D:Food/web for short, a series of in-person engagements nested within DWeb Camp (August 7-11, 2024) explored how to bridge decentralized web and tech sovereignty organizing with the long-standing decentralized, global food sovereignty movements. D:Food/web examined innovative technologies and strategies to promote food sovereignty through empowering smallholder farmers, workers, and agricultural co-ops around the world. 

In many ways, the World Wide Web and the food web have moved in similar directions. The Web’s original vision of democratic access and free participation has gradually transformed into a Web 2.0 where platform consolidation and commodification dominate, mirroring the ongoing value extraction and corporate capture across the global food web. These parallel trends continue today. With the rapid pace of digitalization, industrial agriculture is borrowing from the Silicon Valley playbook, shifting from seed and chemical inputs to data, which threatens to further entrench a deeply inequitable and unsustainable food system. A critical assessment of the risks associated with new technology is essential for actively combating systemic injustice.

Participants at D:Food/web emphasized the importance of resilient, community-driven innovation in addressing climate change. They assessed the open-source agricultural ecosystem and mapped key functions and roles for a more participatory system, including:

• Intellectual property and governance models like "copy fair" licenses promote fair access and cooperation among smaller players.

• The need for a shared road map and new structures for collaboration across scale.

• Future funding models, such as collective impact and community governed funds.

• ‘Bridges’ between civil society organizations, farmers, farmworker organizations, and technologists.

• Increased interoperability through APIs and data standards.

• The importance of community ownership and community-driven design based on trust and real-world problems.

Together, participants articulated a development, funding, and governance mechanism to guide the ecosystem. This mechanism proposes a non-extractive agricultural technology commons with three main components: a Public Utility layer, an Enterprise layer, and novel exit strategies like, Exit to Commons (ExC) and Exit to Community (E2C).