Risk and ethics assessment and the GAIA ethics toolkit

Generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly reshaping agricultural advisory systems, offering new opportunities for climate resilience, productivity gains, and improved decision-making. Yet its adoption in agriculture—particularly in smallholder contexts—comes with significant sociotechnical and ethical risks. These risks arise from data quality limitations, unequal power dynamics, opaque algorithms, and gaps in accountability and governance. This report outlines these emerging challenges and presents the rationale, structure, and expected impact of a forthcoming GAIA Ethics Toolkit designed to ensure responsible development and deployment of GenAI-enabled agricultural advisory systems.

Global conversations around data governance, including outcomes from the 2024 UN World Data Forum, stress the importance of equitable and FAIR data ecosystems. In agriculture, where digital innovation intersects closely with farmer livelihoods, environmental stability, and national strategies, responsible AI development is essential. Applications such as crop management chatbots, long-lead weather forecasting, and AI-driven pest detection tools already demonstrate strong potential. However, they also highlight the vulnerabilities introduced by poor data representativeness, model opacity, privacy risks, and the marginalisation of traditional knowledge.