A report by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems warns that major technology companies—including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, and Alibaba—are increasingly shaping agriculture through AI tools and data-driven farming systems. These tools analyze data from satellites, drones, and farm sensors to recommend which crops farmers should grow and how to manage their fields. Critics argue this creates a top-down system where corporate algorithms influence global food production rather than farmers’ local knowledge and needs.

Experts involved in the report warn that such systems could push farmers toward a narrow set of globally dominant crops—mainly corn, rice, wheat, soybeans, and potatoes—because these are the crops that industrial agriculture companies have the most data, seeds, and chemical inputs for. This could marginalize traditional or locally adapted crops, such as teff in Ethiopia, and force farmers into purchasing proprietary seeds, machinery, fertilizers, and pesticides from multinational corporations. Critics say this increases dependence on global supply chains and makes the food system more vulnerable to shocks like war or climate change.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/mar/03/tech-firms-ai-farming-tools-food-system-security

Most MPs have never had to live like the people they legislate for. They haven’t had real jobs in the way most people understand the term. They haven’t tried to get through a month on minimum wage, or dealt with the bureaucracy of benefits, or spent their evenings calculating which bills can be postponed without triggering a crisis. Politics isn’t something they came to after seeing how the country works. Politics is what they did instead of learning how the country works. When they talk about ‘ordinary people’, they invariably mean people they don’t know.

[...] If politics is built on short-term attention it rewards whoever is most willing to inflame, to simplify, to scapegoat. The intelligent thing to do, if you actually cared about the country, would be the slow work of developing public understanding. Yet what we get, again and again, is the opposite: politicians courting right-wing voters with positions that flatter bigotry rather than challenge it. Braverman is one of many who made her name doing exactly that. Her jump to Reform is the logical conclusion of the politics she helped normalise.

[...] Centrism tends to adopt the far right’s framing while insisting it is doing so responsibly. On immigration, Labour too often behaves as if its task is to manage the rightward drift rather than reverse it. ‘Secure borders’ is a posture, an incantation, rather than a practical programme rooted in law, humanity and reality. Labour’s rhetoric about border enforcement and deterrence increasingly echoes the logic of the hostile environment – the idea that harshness is proof of seriousness. The moral cost is obvious: you normalise cruelty, you legitimise the far right’s premise that human beings are a problem to be solved, and you teach the country that empathy is weakness. British centrism tries to defuse extremism by absorbing it, only to find that it hasn’t defused it but amplified it.

[...] This is the deeper problem with centrism: it wants the prestige of professing values without the cost of acting on them. It’s allergic to taking moral risks. It will cheer international law when it flatters Britain’s self-image, but equivocate when it implicates an ally. Inconsistency is not a minor flaw in an era of authoritarian resurgence. It’s a structural invitation. Fascists thrive on the collapse of shared standards. They feed on the public recognition that rules are selective, that principles are mere branding, that justice is transactional.

[...] This is the deeper problem with centrism: it wants the prestige of professing values without the cost of acting on them. It’s allergic to taking moral risks. It will cheer international law when it flatters Britain’s self-image, but equivocate when it implicates an ally. Inconsistency is not a minor flaw in an era of authoritarian resurgence. It’s a structural invitation. Fascists thrive on the collapse of shared standards. They feed on the public recognition that rules are selective, that principles are mere branding, that justice is transactional.

Much of our politics now consists of performance rather than governance. The calculations are short-term by design: win the week, dominate the clip, neutralise the headline. The long-term consequences – the erosion of empathy, the normalisation of cruelty, a growing sense that nobody in charge believes what they say – are outsourced to society to endure.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/february/the-centre-shrinks