Last December I told Belal Jahjooh he was right about digital agriculture. I was right about the wrong half of it.
Jahjooh’s policy paper, Born Poor, Die Poor, argues that “digital solutions cannot compensate for unfair markets.” I went further in the comments and wrote that digital agriculture fails because it does not change a system designed to keep smallholders poor.
AgriTech founders and their funders made the opposite bet. In CTA and Dalberg’s Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report, advisory services held 22.6 million of 33 million farmer registrations, or 68%. Market linkages held 8%.
Jahjooh and I are right about the 68%. We are wrong about the 8%. Digital agriculture raised incomes where it put a second buyer in front of the farmer.
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Advice Apps Move Income by Single Digits
A 2025 meta-analysis by Robert Beach and colleagues found that digital information interventions raised farmer income 6% on average, with a confidence interval of 2% to 9%. Five of the ten studies they used to assess income found no significant change. Raissa Fabregas, Michael Kremer, and Frank Schilbach argued in Science that gains this size still beat delivery costs by an order of magnitude.
I accept that. A cheap 6% is a decent extension program. The farmer still sells to the same trader on the same terms.
Price Information Needs a Second Buyer
Sandip Mitra and colleagues gave West Bengal potato farmers in randomly chosen villages the wholesale price. Average farm-gate prices did not move. The farmers bargained with village middlemen whose only competition was other middlemen. Knowing the price gave a farmer nowhere else to sell.
The Fishermen Fight Is About the Second Buyer
Robert Jensen’s 2007 Kerala study reported that after mobile coverage arrived, 30 to 40% of fishermen sold outside their local market and profits rose 8%. In 2016 I called it the largest lie in ICT4D. I was amplifying Jacques Steyn’s argument that licensing and auctioneer credit tied fishermen to one landing center.
Janaki Srinivasan and Jenna Burrell’s ethnography found Jensen’s results held in north Kerala, where geography and credit let fishers sell at different markets. In south Kerala, where credit tied them down, his results generally did not hold. Jensen named the same constraint in his own paper.
Jensen and his critics disagree about Kerala. They agree that the phone paid off only where the fisherman could sell to someone else.
Karnataka Shifted Power Until Traders Stopped It
Karnataka’s Unified Market Platform let outside traders bid in every state market. Retsef Levi and colleagues found in PNAS that it raised paddy prices 5%, which they calculated as profit gains of 36% to 159% on thin smallholder margins. One co-author worked for the platform’s operator.
For cotton, green gram, and tur, prices did not move.
The authors tied the difference partly to in-market concentration. Where a few traders controlled a crop, they kept controlling it on the platform. India’s agriculture ministry says the same thing plainly: states boost trade on e-NAM by licensing all registered buyers to bid across mandis. The lever is a licensing rule.
The Easy Version Is the One We Built
I have written the easy version myself. In May 2024 I wrote that AI brings hope to Nigerian smallholders, and I never asked who buys their crop.
Donors can fix this in a grant application. Require applicants to count the buyers a farmer can sell to today and after the project. If the count stays the same, fund it as extension and price it that way.
If a digital agriculture project cannot name the second buyer, it is extension with a login screen.
