Can AI solve farmers’ problems?

There is a rule in complex systems: fragility gathers at the bottom, but the tremor is felt at the top. Bangladesh's food system follows this rule to the letter.

Every season, millions of farmers behave like rational agents trapped inside an irrational market. They generate the most granular data ecosystem in the country – soil moisture, pest movement, rainfall shifts, seed-quality microclimate anomalies – far richer than anything in Dhaka's dashboards.

Yet paradoxically, the farmer has the least access to the intelligence produced by his own labour. This is the Agricultural Intelligence Paradox: the people who generate the data have the least claim over its value.

Economists label this as market failure, technologists call it a systems gap, activists/philosophers call it injustice and farmers simply call it loss. And loss compounds.

Walk through any bazaar in Bangladesh and you will see two different nations: one that grows the food and another that controls its fate. The prices of potatoes, onions and vegetables appear to rise and fall mysteriously. But mystery is merely a polite word for opacity, which in turn is a polite word for power.

For the farmer, each season is a gamble without probabilities. He sells without knowing what others are selling. He stores without knowing who else is storing. He buys fertiliser without knowing the expected return. He takes loans without knowing the real risk.

In Nassim Nicholas Taleb's language, he is exposed to full downside and denied the upside.

Everyone in the chain is hedged – the trader hedges with information, the wholesaler with storage and the exporter with forward contracts. Only the farmer walks naked into volatility.

The zeitgeist of our times, AI, can actually help here, can actually matter, if we let it.

Most conversations about AI are marinated in buzzwords and grandstanding. Large models, digital nations, predictive governance – too often spoken from air-conditioned rooms far from the realities that matter.

But in agriculture, AI becomes brutally simple: it converts uncertainty into probability. It turns volatility into foresight. It turns the blindfold into a window.

Imagine this: price signals two weeks ahead; crop disease detection from a simple photo; storage facility mapping within a 5-10 km radius; hyperlocal weather intelligence instead of vague national alerts; and decision trees for when to sell, store, bargain or wait.

This is not technology hype; it is the mathematics of survival. And survival is political. A nation reveals its priorities by what it chooses to formalise. For decades, we formalised bureaucracy, not intelligence. A Farmer's ID changes that.

It has the potential to be the first institutional acknowledgment that farmers deserve a share of the intelligence they produce.

Through it, a farmer gains: predictive price insights, targeted subsidies, credit access rooted in real data, verified production identity and crop advisory aligned with market cycles. Along with the visibility of storage and transport options.

In other words, that ID shifts the farmer from a price-taker to a player. He gains optionality – the ability to choose rather than be chosen for.

Bangladesh's economy can survive many shocks, but food system fragility is not one of them. A nation collapses not when it lacks food, but when it loses trust in prices. And food prices are simply signals distorted by missing intelligence.

When syndicates can manipulate markets because farmers lack information, you get structural injustice. When farmers take loans without knowing demand curves, you get debt traps. When storage is absent or invisible, you get waste disguised as fate.

AI does not solve politics. But it forces transparency into places where manipulation once hid comfortably. That alone alters power.

The Agricultural Intelligence Paradox is not resolved by apps, dashboards or another round of rural training workshops. These are cosmetic technicalities applied to a structural wound. It is resolved when the intelligence generated by farmers serves the farmers first. When the producer has more information than the middleman. When the price-taker becomes the price-negotiator. When the most fragile actor finally claims the upside.

This is how you restore symmetry in a system built on asymmetry. And that is not just digital reform. It is a political reform. For decades, Bangladesh has built agricultural institutions but not agricultural intelligence.

The Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council (BARC), the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) and a constellation of specialised agencies produced reports, trials and pilot projects, yet the intelligence loop never reached the farmer.

Data stayed in silos, research stayed on paper, and decisions stayed in ministries. The system optimised for bureaucratic output, not farmer outcomes.

Every agency guarded its turf; none built a coherent intelligence layer that connected plots to prices, storage to supply, weather to yield or risk to credit.

In a system where information is fragmented, the farmer remains fragmented. The way forward is not another department, another project or another dashboard – it is integration. A single farmer-centric intelligence spine linking BARC's science, DAE's extension network, Barind Multipurpose Development Authority's irrigation data, the Department of Agricultural Marketing's market prices and the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics' production cycles.

When these silos speak to each other – and to the farmer – Bangladesh finally moves from agricultural administration to agricultural intelligence.

Food-independent countries – whether the Netherlands, Denmark or Japan – did not achieve security through land or luck, but through relentless investment in farmer intelligence. They removed the blindfold.

The Farmer's ID, strengthened with AI, price prediction and storage mapping, is more than a programme. It is a correction and rebalancing. The future of food security in Bangladesh will not be written in conferences or policy memos.

It will be written in the fields, by farmers who finally see, decide, negotiate and win. With their intelligence comes the nation's stability.

The author is an assistant professor at North South University and member of UNESCO AI Ethics Experts Without Borders. He can be reached at zulkarin@gmail.com