The new politics of food sovereignty
This article is authored by Shishira Bhowmik, director, Praanisha Healthcare LLP.
In 2050, your breakfast might be perfectly engineered. It will know your sleep score, your hormonal rhythm, and the exact bacterial composition of your gut. An app will select what your body “needs,” not what you crave. Your nutrition will be flawless, your digestion optimised — and yet, something will feel missing. That missing thing will be ownership.
The question that will define the future of food is no longer what we eat, but who owns the right to decide it.
This is not a futuristic thought experiment. In 2025, the world sits at an inflection point — one where food, data and power have become indistinguishable. The FAO–COP28 continuum has accelerated the digitisation of agriculture, embedding food systems into climate governance and carbon accounting. Under the FAO’s new Food Systems Transformation Framework, nations are being asked to monitor soil health, crop emissions and biodiversity in real time — a shift that turns farming into a data exercise as much as an ecological one.
On paper, it’s progress. In practice, it’s creating a global food cloud where information flows upward — from farmers to servers, from the local to the corporate. What once grew from the ground is now grown from code.
Meanwhile, a quieter revolution is unfolding at the microbial level. Microbiome patenting wars are intensifying as companies race to claim ownership of bacterial strains once found freely in fermented foods. The European Patent Office has seen a sharp rise in filings for probiotic sequences and microbial compounds since 2021. Multinationals now hold exclusive rights to the microbes in yoghurt, kimchi and idli batter — the invisible life forms that once belonged to everyone. Whoever controls microbial data will soon control the language of immunity, nutrition and even flavour.
Pause here and imagine your grandmother’s kitchen — the pickles bubbling quietly in the corner, the dosa batter breathing overnight. Those jars weren’t recipes; they were microbial archives, coded by weather, hand and time. Today, that same living culture can be reduced to a line of genetic code owned by a corporation continents away.
From the microscopic to the algorithmic, the same logic repeats — nourishment once communal is now being coded, patented and privatised.
Algorithmic eating has become the new aspiration. Our food choices are increasingly mediated by apps that promise personalisation — a meal plan tailored to your genome, your mood or your gut bacteria. Yet most of these algorithms are trained on western datasets, applying uniform nutritional logic to diverse bodies. The more we personalise, the more we standardise. We are eating smarter but knowing less, surrendering cultural intelligence to computational authority.
It’s a strange irony of modern life: the same phone that once captured family recipes now tells us what to eat, when to eat and how much joy is permissible. We scroll past our own instincts, outsourcing appetite to an interface.
The future of nourishment may not be about hunger at all — it may be about consent.
This digital pattern extends to the soil itself. The artificial intelligence (AI) agriculture nexus has turned the farm into a feedback loop of prediction and optimisation. Machine learning models now determine when farmers plant, how much fertiliser they use and what yield they can expect. The catch is that the data doesn’t belong to them. The same four corporations that control over 60% of the world’s commercial seed sales — Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina and BASF — also own the platforms that process agronomic data.
Farmers still own the land — but not its mind.
In the 20th century, corporations sold seeds. In the 21st, they sell the software that decides how the seed will live.
At the global level, food is once again shaping geopolitics. Climate volatility and conflict have made commodities like wheat, rice and pulses instruments of power. The Russia– Ukraine war reshaped the world’s grain map. The European Union’s carbon border taxes have added new barriers to agricultural exports. The 2025 UN Food Systems Stocktake and growing calls for a Global Biodiversity Credit Market now tie agricultural independence directly to national security. Countries such as India, Brazil and Vietnam — once dependent on Western food aid — have become exporters and policy actors. Yet even as they produce more, they remain tethered to imported genetics, fertilisers and cloud infrastructure. The next axis of power will not be measured by hectares or GDP but by food data independence — the capacity to feed without surveillance.
Parallel to these structural shifts, a cultural one is taking shape. Gut health has become a form of identity, a shorthand for control in an unstable world. From kombucha startups to probiotic capsules, the microbiome has moved from petri dish to pop culture. What began as science has become selfhood — and commerce. Consumer microbiome kits feed vast private databases, building a trillion-gigabyte portrait of the human gut. In this new economy, our bacteria are both the product and the currency.
Walk into any modern grocery aisle and you’ll see this new language of control on display — “detox,” “clean,” “balance.” Words that once described nature now describe algorithms of wellness. The act of eating, once relational and ritualistic, has been reformatted into a kind of performance.
At the centre of these global tensions stands India — a civilisation that once treated food as prayer, now standing at the crossroads of policy, profit and preservation. The country’s microbial and botanical wealth gives it leverage few others possess. Yet leverage without protection is vulnerability. Without clear biotrade regulations, microbial commons can
become microbial colonies. India could lead a new model — one that values biodiversity not as heritage but as infrastructure. A national microbial biobank, open-data fermentation repositories and culturally inclusive nutrition algorithms could ensure that indigenous strains and fermentation knowledge remain public, not privatised.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Food sovereignty is no longer about borders or subsidies. It is about the right to seed, feed and feel in one’s own microbial language. The more we digitise the act of nourishment, the more we must humanise its governance. Biodiversity, gut data and taste memory must be treated not as commodities but as shared public assets — part of the moral architecture of civilisation itself.
This article is authored by Shishira Bhowmik, director, Praanisha Healthcare LLP.
