By Barbara Van Dyck and Danya Nadar
This blog post is a modified version of a panel paper we presented at a researchers’ day at the Université Libre de Bruxelles revolving around “Planetary Boundaries and Geopolitical Fractures”. Illustration of the talk by NoireLaVache
We spoke about agricultural research in connection to the EU race to arms not only because the topic is close to our research on the digital transformation and what it does to agriculture, but also because we are very concerned about the present moment. We are devastated with the destruction of human and other life around the world and ask about the role of the university in the multiple crises we find ourselves in.
We feel the consequences of, for example, rapid climate derailing, the rise of authoritarianism, and austerity measures. We are also witnessing popular discontent globally with the failure of our governments as well as international mechanisms to protect Palestinians as we watch a genocide unfold while their living environments are destroyed for future generations.
In Europe we hear the drumbeats of war loud and clear – our governments are pledging to expand their military spending to 1.5%. A choice that we know all too well comes at the expense of the welfare state.
As part of this militarization program, in April 2025, the European Commission proposed a radical change in its research policy and made a call to allow military use in its Horizon research & innovation programs, withan emphasis on dual-use.
This call will drive up research spending for military purposes, including AI, biotechnology and autonomous systems, and increase direct and indirect collaborations between universities and the arms & defense industry.
A quick look at Belgium’s Belspo’s Defence related Research Action page shows that researchers and laboratories of the university where we work, are (or have recently been) involved in things like the development of 5G networks for naval applications, coordinated a project that studies the ballistic impact on space material, and work on underwater communications for drone swarms.
Up to now we have just taken stock of research military collaborations that have been initiated before the current moment of normalising rearmament and militarism. This begs the question: what is to come? We believe this isn’t about academic freedom, but a fundamental political and ethical question that touches researchers in agricultural research directly.
Consider this: the military industrial complex outsources its research to the university to engage many of the brightest minds. By hosting such research, the university both prepares students and PhD researchers to graduate and pursue careers in the military complex while also giving the military industry the legitimacy it needs.
We should not welcome collaborations with the defence industry on university campuses, nor should we celebrate the promises that come with dual-use research and innovation programs’ financing that will flow to the university.
These examples of direct collaborations are clear, and probably most people reading this blog today would agree with us that there should be no place for the military on our campuses. But the arguments of dual-use – the idea that technologies can be used both for military and civilian purposes – confuses the debate.
In our research at friction we focus on technological trajectories in agriculture.
Historically, the use of herbicides is a commonly used technology in industrialised agriculture that emerged as a byproduct of the second world war. The military also uses pesticides as a chemical weapon. Think of the spraying of at least 41 million liters of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese in the 1960s, or more recently, since 2014 Israel has been spraying herbicides onto Palestinian agriculture lands in the buffer area separating itself from the Gaza Strip, creating dead zones in formerly arable lands.
And yet its effects on agriculture, farmers and lands continue until today. As our colleague Larissa Bombardi’s work shows, the pesticide industry is at the source of innumerable health problems outsourced to the global south while upholding global trading systems that amount to chemical colonialism.
What pesticides show, is that the military logic of elimination becomes part of the technology itself – herbicides are used to control the environment and eliminate any ‘unwanted’ plants or so-called weeds.
These are just a handful examples of the defense industry’s dual use of agricultural technology for military purposes.
Today, the marriage between big tech, agricultural machinery and the chemical industry is transforming agriculture. And as the unfolding genocide of the Palestinians has shown us, Big Tech is crucial in contemporary computerized warfare such as the use Microsoft AI technologies and cloud services to facilitate the killing of Palestinians.
Indeed, military machines today have less to do with planes, tanks and artillery, but largely rely on complex AI-driven automated systems.
How then does the marriage of big tech, the military and agriculture technologies translate onto the fields and transform our landscapes?
We see early signs of this transformation in the way cow collars spatially control cattle. From our team, Coline Prévost’s research with Belgian dairy farmers has drawn our attention to the ways Israeli surveillance technologies continuously monitor cows. For example, the use of Afimilk hoof sensors to closely observe cow’s mating cycles or SCR technology that tracks cow rumination. These two are examples of the ways AI technologies, often marketed in agricultural circles as tools for efficiency and cow well-being, are produced with the military logic of population control: embedded within them are spying technologies that get extended to remote-control installation of fences to spatially control a cow’s movement while limiting the number of workers to manage more cows.
Netafim, an irrigation drip irrigation technology sold as an environmental solution for farmers to a changing climate, has partnered with mPrest Systems to build its smart system derived from making use of Israeli defense related precision technologies, the Iron Dome. These technologies are lauded to have been ‘field tested’ to create NetBeatTM, “first irrigation system with a brain: through mPrests Systems’ “air awareness, target classification, and the calculated and controlled launch and interception processes”. “The brain is a smart irrigation management platform that allows farmers to monitor, analyze and control irrigation technologies in a closed-loop platform, providing customized daily irrigation strategies and providing real-time data”. – one that as Who Profits puts it, tests conducted not in the benefit farmers but for the prolongation of the occupation and ongoing siege (pp.42)
Picture: demonstration of drones for agricultural use in Flanders (source: authors)
Another technology that is widely promoted – even if not (yet) widely present in agriculture in Belgium – is the use of drones. At a demonstration day for agroecology, the Flemish research institute for agriculture and fishery for example promoted the use of drones for accomplishing tasks such as spraying of bio-stimulants and irrigation; the whitening of greenhouses; or sewing without the need for humans walking the field or heavy tractors further compacting soils. At other agricultural fairs it promotes its use for monitoring, mapping and pesticide spraying.
The use of drones in agriculture makes military technology into harmless objects that normalise a camera’s constant monitoring of movement and conditions, the diffusion of imaginations of control and remote-controlled machine interventions such as killing. It also further expands the market for technologies that are directly driving warfare and playing into the hands of authoritarian, hierarchically controlled political regimes, and increasing collusion of Big Tech.
Dual-use does not need to be unidirectional, rather it is cyclical: traditionally we are familiar with the transfer from military Research & technology to civilian purposes.
What we are seeing today – for example in Ukraine – is the improvement of military technology, such as drones, because of their widescale use in a number of civilian sectors including agriculture, that test and scale these technologies, which then are further used for military purposes.
To conclude –the argument commonly made is that virtually all technologies could have dual-use implications. But we do not believe modern technologies emerge in a political vacuum. The technologies we highlighted emerged in a moment of climate crises, deeply racist societies and world orders, militarization and genocide.
The university’s research collaborations into these technologies and all the things they might offer to farmers (or others) cannot be understood without also highlighting how they work to:
- Normalise the production of military technologies for civilian purposes: dual-use technologies and collaborations normalise the integration of militarisation into our society, offering the military a platform to whitewash/greenwash their technologies while offering society’s brightest minds to participate in creating these technologies;
- Normalise and expand military logics of control and elimination within the technology itself: we see this increasingly used in crowd control, or remote-control surveillance, and how it gets translated onto the agricultural field;
- Expand the military industrial complex’s markets: public and private spending in dual-use technology research creates what some may see as ‘business potential’. It creates economies of scale and market expansion by reworking the technology itself from killing machines to providing a civic service;
- Feedback civilian use of these technologies to bolster the military industry: there is growing evidence that when military technologies get adopted in the public sphere they provide data to defence companies that later improves their weapons. This is the case, for example in drones. This is seen by the use of adapted civilian drones in Ukraine, which shows as – head of research of NATO observed – that we are facing a reversal where in the 1970s research was driven by big military research programs such as DARPA while today innovation is driven by civilian ecosystems that show how civilian drones are instrumental in the quick, scaling and cheap expansion for future military capabilities.
In the current climate of rearmament, we believe it is crucial for each of us in our capacities as researchers, as colleagues, as members of departments and faculties, to object and be vocal about the university’s roles in militarization and militarism, to feed into and hold accountable ethical committees, to organize for a university that is life-promoting instead of death-dealing.
This also highlights once again the importance of grounding agroecology debates politically and firmly in anti-colonial, re-peasantisation and food sovereignty agendas. An increasing number of activities that frame digital technologies in the light of its potentials and barriers for agroecology, risk to mostly pay lip service to the larger digital security imperative. As we have argued above, we cannot disentangle the climate crisis, from genocide, from agroecological solutions provided by big tech, to the role our public universities have in being part of driving these solutions – as well as the young minds involved in making futures for themselves in these industries.
