Acknowledgements: GODAN – Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition – was commissioned to undertake this study by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The authors acknowledge support from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) via the Open African Innovation Research (Open AIR) network, and the Canada First Research Excellence Fund via the Plant Phenotyping and Imaging Research Centre (P2IRC) at the Global Institute for Food Security (GIFS), as well as Sustainability in the Digital Age and Future Earth for related research informing this study. Thanks to Kelsea Gillespie, Nicole Tumaine, and Erin Gleeson for their research and editorial assistance and to reviewers at the Food and Agriculture Organization for comments. Thanks to Beverley Mitchell and Andréa Ventimiglia for copy-editing and to Rachelle Fox for layout and design.

This study analyses the ownership, control, and governance of the benefits of data related to food and agriculture. It covers genetic information derived from crop germplasm as well as other data from and/or for e-agriculture, also known as digital agriculture, precision agriculture, or smart farming. A key point is that the data governance challenges for gene sequence information are often discussed separately from data governance in e-agriculture, but the core issues are fundamentally related. Connecting policy debates about digital sequence information with developments in e-agriculture more generally can improve food and agricultural data governance overall.