How Blockchain Can Contribute to Food Production Sustainability

As mentioned in the previous article, Key Factors in the Sustainability of Global Food Production, Blockchain technology is recognized as a strategic ally for the management of value chains. Providing trust and transparency are the promises of its main technological attributes.

This technology is characterized by great safety and transparency, providing high value to the management of the supply chain among stakeholders and, of course, the great role of marketing and communication with consumers, ensuring that what they are buying is not a copycat product, since consumers can follow the entire process, from the collection of raw materials and its processing to the point of sale.

Undoubtedly, this technology will be the great ally of the agri-food sector in the coming years. Analyzing the big and prospective challenges, experts assure that by the year 2050, around 9.8 billion people will inhabit this planet, or around 2 billion more than in 2020. It will be necessary to increase global food production by 70 percent while, at the same time, facing great challenges derived from climate change, water scarcity, limited natural resources and less arable land as well as the abandonment of fields, which limits production capacity due to the lack of human resources to grow food.

Following this same analysis, the impact derived from the evolution of the markets versus the distribution of the world population and the trends on the food transition of consumers, global planning in food production will be required. Artificial intelligence will also be a great ally for the prediction of demand, without neglecting that the consumer has declared itself the main regulator for the food industry to adopt sustainability as part of its business philosophy.

There are tons of data and multiple transactions in a food supply chain that have to be validated from point to point. Regulatory agents, as well as certifying seals and logistics intermediaries involved in the distribution of food worldwide, highlight that in recent years, the industry has made great strides in the implementation of best practices in food production and distribution, although food counterfeiting, highly polluting harmful inputs and fraud and corruption factors have significant impact and counterbalance these advances.

Going back to the challenges for the coming years, it is imperative to start implementing these technologies. More production means more data that will need to be analyzed, also incorporating social responsibility and environmental care criteria into regulatory and certification schemes, with all this traceability available in a single information code for the consumer, forcing transparency of the best production and sustainability practices applied to the products that are served at our tables every day.

How can sustainability in food production be made transparent via Blockchain? Blockchain was born from an interconnected environment where digital villagers are today the first generation with independent economic capacity. They have been integrated into value chains and have forced them to operate collaboratively; that is, they must work in favor of all groups of interest and with this achieve a clear and efficient management responding to sector stakeholders.

Blockchain is part of the Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), databases that manage several participants in a decentralized and transparent fashion. It is very useful in the agri-food sector, since with this management, a large part of the solution in the control of traceability and food safety is accelerated and the products of origin are traced, verifying the practices of social responsibility and environmental care. Other schemes intervene here that will have to be intertwined in data blocks to comply with current regulations and certifications.

Taking into consideration a wide variety of state-of-the-art technologies, this tool allows us to obtain unique records. That is, it provides us with immutability and data management throughout the supply chain, promoting traceability in all links, as well as data encryption in a secure manner, which remain safe and incorruptible. In the commercial field, it offers us transaction digitization with business intelligence, among other advantages. 

A few years ago, IBM announced the first consortium of the world's 10 largest food suppliers to apply Blockchain technology to the supply chain to improve food safety and ingredient transparency. Currently, this same consortium sees the need to integrate the records on compliance with best production practices in environmental and social responsibility issues. But Blockchain offers great advantages to help manage consumer preferences. In this sector, this tool is identified as Blockchain Food Quality Protection, which oversees the registration process of a product.

All these advantages in the sector imply improving traceability control and food safety in a coordinated manner among the participants in the value chain, increasing the supplier-customer trust relationship and anticipating consumer trends in global markets.

By having an intelligent planning of food production and distribution, in addition to safety and traceability factors, the industry will avoid intensive production with uncertain demand or destination, which causes food waste, stress on natural resources and greenhouse emissions. So, it is key to promote dignity for those who work in this industry as a virtuous circle between consumers and collaborative brands among all groups of interest.

(In collaboration of Lizadeth Sato Quintero)