Galuh Dian Prama Dewi (BINUS)
In many countries across the Global South, the concern on digital agriculture is intensifying alongside mounting pressures on food and agricultural systems. Climate disruptions, market volatility, and limited access to agricultural finance are among the reasons why governments are beginning to view digital solutions more seriously (Birner et al., 2021). Indonesia faces a similar combination of pressures. Yet much of the domestic discussion still centres on connectivity, investment, digital capacity, and expanding producer participation in agritech platforms. Indonesia shows why this agenda is incomplete. When agritech platforms connect farmers and fish farmers not only to technology but also to financing, inputs, buyers, logistics, production information, and data services, digitalisation begins to reshape who controls access to economic opportunities. I argue that Indonesia’s central agritech challenge is therefore not simply how to accelerate digital adoption, but how to govern the dependencies that digitalisation creates. This matters beyond Indonesia because similar tensions can arise where private digital platforms increasingly mediate essential economic relationships.
The attraction of agritech in Indonesia is understandable. Many farmers and fish farmers operate within fragmented value chains and continue to face uneven access to formal credit, reliable market information, logistics, technology, and stronger bargaining positions, a pattern also noted in assessments of Indonesia’s digital agriculture landscape (World Bank, 2020). Digital platforms promise to connect these functions more efficiently. eFishery’s role in Indonesian aquaculture was never confined to automated feeding; its platform also connected fish farmers with financing, farm management services, inputs, buyers, and data-based support (eFishery, 2023). Bringing these functions together changes more than service delivery because it also changes the relationships through which producers reach lenders, suppliers, markets, and logistics providers. The governance issue follows from that shift. Digitalisation does not make intermediaries disappear. What changes is who occupying that position and how influence is exercised through it. Traditional intermediaries have long helped producers secure credit, input, information, and access to markets, even though relying on them can also leave producers with less room to negotiate.
Digital platforms can create alternatives and formalise access to services. Yet when financing, transactions, production information, and market access become increasingly organised through a single digital ecosystem, dependence may shift rather than disappear. It moves from locally embedded relationships towards systems structured by platform rules, eligibility criteria, data flows, and digital transactions. This distinction matters because digital inclusion is not the same as economic empowerment. A farmer may gain access to more buyers while having little influence over how that access is organised. A fish farmer may obtain financing while remaining unable to negotiate the conditions linking credit, inputs, production, and sales. Producers may receive more information while platforms accumulate far greater capacity to collect and organise data on production, demand, transactions, and user behaviour. Concerns about this uneven distribution of influence are also present in research on digital farming, which cautions that greater technological participation does not necessarily remove existing inequalities in power (Bronson, 2019). The relevant question is therefore not only whether producers are connected, but whether they retain meaningful control over the terms of connection.
Indonesia should consequently resist treating user growth, investment value, platform expansion, or technological adoption as sufficient indicators of agritech success. These measures reveal scale, but not necessarily sustainability. When producers come to rely on a platform for financing, production, or access to markets, the platform’s business sustainability becomes a governance issue as well. Financial instability, weak accountability, or service disruption can then reach beyond investors and shareholders to producers whose participation in wider markets increasingly runs through that platform.
The contrast between privately operated digital services and publicly coordinated platform models makes this tension easier to see. Private agritech companies can innovate quickly, integrate services, mobilise investment, and respond to market opportunities. Risks can also emerge in the financing services that sit alongside agritech ecosystems. In May 2024, Indonesia’s Financial Services Authority (OJK) withdrew TaniFund’s business licence, citing the company’s failure to meet minimum equity requirements and to follow supervisory recommendations. India offers a different model. Its e-NAM platform is publicly coordinated and has been used to connect agricultural markets at scale, although public administration can bring its own institutional constraints (Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, 2025). The lesson is not that governments should replace private agritech firms, nor that private innovation can govern itself. The more convincing approach is hybrid governance in which innovation, oversight, responsibility, and producer representation are distributed across different actors.
For Indonesia, hybrid governance should mean more than bringing government, companies, investors, cooperatives, producers, communities, and civil society into the same discussion. Hybrid governance is useful only if it limits how much influence any single actor can exercise over the agritech system. This division of roles is consistent with collaborative-governance approaches that rely on shared responsibility across public and non-state actors (Ansell & Gash, 2008). Even so, some responsibilities cannot simply be left to the platform. Public authorities still need to establish basic safeguards for data use, digital services, and financing, especially where users have limited influence over the terms under which those services are provided. Platforms are responsible for the transparency and reliability of their services, while investors help determine whether firms privilege long-term value or rapid scale. Cooperatives and producer organisations can strengthen the position of producers, especially where individual users have little bargaining power. In practice, simply adding more actors does not make the system more balanced.
Assembling a broad spectrum of participants within a hybrid governance arrangement does not translate into equal influence. Producers might hold formal seats on advisory boards while exerting minimal sway over the actual mechanics of the platform. Meanwhile, regulators face a different challenge: transactions, data practices, and access rules can evolve more rapidly than the mechanisms used to oversee them. Regulators face a different problem: transactions, data practices, and rules governing access can change faster than oversight mechanisms. The real test is practical. Who sets the terms? Who carries the risk when the system fails? Who benefits from the arrangement and controls the data? And, perhaps most importantly, can producers realistically leave and use another provider? Indonesia has not solved these questions. Its value as a case lies precisely in making them difficult to ignore.
This has direct international relevance. Indonesia should not position itself merely as an attractive market for agritech investment or as evidence that digital platforms can expand rapidly across developing economies. Indonesia’s experience could matter internationally for more than the growth of its agritech sector. A more interesting test is whether the country can make room for private investment and technological innovation without weakening public oversight or producers’ ability to shape the systems they depend on. Indonesia’s response to this tension could shape what it brings to international discussions on digital transformation, responsible investment, development cooperation, and the governance of technology-driven markets. The issue is not whether regulation should restrain technology or whether the state should displace the market. The harder question is how authority should be divided when public and private actors increasingly govern the same digital ecosystem. What matters is how authority is shared and constrained once these actors become entangled in the same agritech ecosystem. The next stage of Indonesia’s agritech transformation should therefore not be judged by how many producers enter digital platforms, but by whether they remain able to negotiate, choose, and participate once those platforms become difficult to live without.
Short Bio
Galuh Dian Prama Dewi is a faculty member in the International Relations Program at BINUS University. Her research focuses on the intersection of international political economy, business, and sustainability, with particular interests in carbon and environmental governance, food security, agricultural technology, renewable energy, and sustainability transitions in Indonesia and the Global South. She is currently a doctoral candidate in International Relations at Padjajaran University.
Reference:
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