From Surveillance Monocultures to Agroecological Defense: A Sovereignty-centered Framework for Agricultural Cyberbiosecurity

Abstract

Agricultural cyberbiosecurity (CBS) scholarship may have overwhelmingly adopted centralized, national-securityoriented
frameworks that leave community-governed and agroecologically-grounded alternatives unexplored. Recent AI
safety research demonstrates that provably safe Artificial General Intelligence is mathematically incompatible with trust
and alignment, casting doubt on the viability of general-purpose, centralized safety regimes versus bounded or
decentralized ones (Panigrahy and Sharan, 2025). Some leading expressions of the centralized CBS paradigm propose
billions in surveillance architecture spanning unified biological intelligence (BIOINT), national bioaudit systems, and
coordinated governance bodies. Centralized approaches often compellingly diagnose monoculture vulnerabilities,
biosurveillance urgency, and the need for novel governance mechanisms. However, in these centralized architectures,
communities receive biosecurity services but do not co-govern biosurveillance priorities, data use, or safety specifications,
and agriculture remains a critical infrastructure to be defended from above. Even when such centralized paradigms
propose distributed biological sensing, such as engineered sentinel plants and living biosensors, these systems require
routine community-level care, maintenance, and trust relationships that centralized architectures cannot deliver, and will
demand iterative updating as threat landscapes evolve. The empirical record confirms the costs of centralization: $11
million in ransom paid by JBS, 40% of U.S. grain production disrupted by a single cooperative's software failure (Yazdinejad
et al., 2021; Cartwright and Cartwright, 2023). Coordination gaps are real, and new institutions are necessary to address
them. However, coordination without corresponding community-level governance authority reproduces the monoculture
pattern at the institutional level. This paper argues that agricultural defense must be rooted in the slowest and most
durable layers of change identified by Stewart Brand's pace-layer framework: nature and culture. We advance three
interlocking components: (1) agroecology as defensive architecture, in which biological diversity and functional redundancy
constitute the primary cyberbiosecurity strategy; (2) sovereignty-preserving biosurveillance, in which community-governed
federated sensing networks retain local data authority while enabling collective threat detection through privacypreserving
mechanisms; and (3) cooperative assurance from below, in which safety specifications are collectively
deliberated and verified through participatory guarantee systems rather than centralized certification hierarchies
(Dalrymple et al., 2024; Carroll et al., 2023; Manoj et al., 2025). This framework does not preclude centralized pathogen
detection where necessary, but insists that top-level and community-level institutions must be in relation so that
coordination flows bidirectionally rather than exclusively from above. Rather than claiming comprehensive safety
guarantees, we demonstrate how bounded formal assurances, when integrated with agroecological resilience and
community governance, can materially improve the security of food systems under real-world constraints.