Our food production is too reliant on Chinese technology
4 min read
Anyone who has watched the latest series of Clarkson’s Farm will know that farming is undergoing a technological revolution
Robot-driven tractors, crop-spraying drones and AI-enabled livestock feeding systems are transforming how our food is grown. Yet these innovations also introduce dangerous new vulnerabilities that could put our food security at risk.
This threat arises from the fact that many of the components that power this cutting-edge technology are manufactured in China. As we have seen in the defence, energy and transport sectors, such components can be remotely manipulated and potentially used for espionage and disruption.
The question for ministers is: if connected technology in telecoms, defence and public buildings has deserved national-security scrutiny, why is the same scrutiny still missing from the technology now embedded in the farms and supply chains that feed the country?
Only last month, it emerged that components in Royal Navy drones used by special forces were transmitting signals to an IP address in China. In that case, the Ministry of Defence acted swiftly to have them removed. In an age when food security is increasingly seen as a crucial part of national security, we should be equally wary about the presence of such potential vulnerabilities in our food production and supply chain systems.
Over the past five years, ministers have ordered the stripping out of Chinese-manufactured technology from sensitive parts of our critical infrastructure. Huawei is being removed from our 5G networks, and Hikvision and Dahua cameras have been banned from central government buildings.
What they have not yet done is ask the same searching questions about the technology becoming increasingly commonplace across the farmlands that feed us. Remote access gives a hostile actor the potential to acquire granular detail about our food production and supply systems, including where any weaknesses lie. And our dependence on this technology could give a supplier that has cornered the market leverage at a time of international tension, by threatening to withhold exports of vital kit.
That is the gap a new report from the Coalition on Secure Technology, the cross-party campaign I chair, sets out to highlight. Autonomous tractors, crop-monitoring drones, livestock sensors and irrigation systems increasingly run on Cellular IoT Modules, small components that connect equipment to mobile networks so it can be monitored, updated and controlled remotely. Chinese manufacturers supply around 70 per cent of the global market for these modules.
This means a growing tranche of the infrastructure behind our food supply now depends on hardware whose firmware, software support and spare parts run through companies under tight supervision of Beijing’s communist rulers. Official Chinese state media is open about the strategy: agricultural technology exports are expanding by design under the Chinese government’s current Five-Year Plan, with contracts increasingly bundling hardware sales with exactly the kind of long-term software dependency our security agencies have warned about in energy and defence.
The pattern is consistent in every sector where Chinese-made tech is becoming ubiquitous: hidden connectivity, embedded in everyday infrastructure that goes largely unchecked.
Food production is one of the UK’s designated critical national infrastructure sectors, yet it has never had a Huawei moment. Agriculture is not among the 17 sectors given mandatory scrutiny under the National Security and Investment Act. No department currently has a clear picture of how much of our food production now depends on hardware of this kind.
This warning does not mean we should panic and call halt to the innovation with the potential to boost agricultural productivity in a way that seemed unthinkable just a decade ago. But we do need to treat this issue as seriously in farming as in other critical sectors.
The government should treat connected agricultural technology as national resilience issue and develop a long-term strategy to address the risks. That strategy must include a clearly defined concept of a “trusted supplier” for these components. We urgently need to reduce our dependence on high-risk, foreign-controlled technology before we discover the hard way how exposed our food supply has become.
Graeme Downie is the Labour MP for Dunfermline & Dollar and Chair of the Coalition on Secure Technology
