Digital Agrarian Regimes in Latin America: How Data, Finance, and Platforms Reorder Smallholder Food Systems

Across Latin America, digital tools are reshaping how smallholder agriculture is governed, financed, and integrated into food supply chains. Yet much of the policy and practitioner debate still frames change through the narrow lens of "technology adoption", as if the main challenge were convincing farmers to use apps. This paper proposes a different concept: digital agrarian regimes, defined as the emerging configurations of power, rules, data infrastructures, and financial incentives through which platforms, agribusiness, lenders, and the state coordinate smallholder production and exchange. Building on critical scholarship that urges us to rethink "adoption" as a social and political process rather than a technical diffusion problem (Gugganig et al., 2023), and on evidence from digital agriculture and digital finance practice (FAO, 2025; GSMA, 2022; GSMA, 2025; Carboni, 2026), the paper outlines how data extraction, scoring, and interoperability standards increasingly shape who gets credit, inputs, and market access, and at what terms. The paper then operationalizes the concept through a Colombia-focused roadmap. It identifies feasible categories of data sources (public microdata and administrative records, price and supply systems, open data portals, connectivity maps, and credit microdata) to empirically track how digital agrarian regimes form in practice. Finally, it proposes policy design principles and "rules of the game" for fairness, accountability, and competition in digital food systems, so that digitalization increases productivity and resilience without deepening dependency, exclusion, or data-driven rent extraction.