How Blockchain is Helping Food Supply chain During Covid-19?
Published on : Sunday 10-05-2020
The Covid-19 pandemic leaves massive burdens on our lives, economies, and societies. The epidemic’s effect has resulted in an unprecedented social and economic impact on society and businesses alike. As the global crisis has impacted cities and business operations, the risk of food supplies is also putting a massive strain on food vendors around the world. In the onset of Covid-19, blockchain is touted is one of the technologies helping food suppliers amid the outbreak and enabling food suppliers to collaborate with others.
The alliance between agri-food suppliers Cargill and Agrocorp, with Rabobank and other logistics partners, to pilot blockchain for faster cross-continental commodity trading in five days, initially focusing on wheat. The collaboration has completed a cross-continent commodity trade transaction of wheat from North America to Southeast Asia on a blockchain platform provided by Singapore-based software company dltledgers.
The transaction of these companies demonstrates the power of partnerships in ensuring the global agriculture supply chain delivers food in a time of uncertainty. The trade transaction, valued at $12 million and settled on 1 April 2020 from North America to Indonesia, occurred with six trading partners participating on a common blockchain platform.
The blockchain platform offers a repeatable framework for end-to-end digital trade executions, digitizing the document and trade execution process. According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), blockchain technology can help tackle supply chain failures exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and also boost the economic recovery process. Releasing a 'blockchain deployment toolkit' to support organisations to improve future pandemic preparedness and accelerate an economic rebound post-Covid-19, WEF said it is intended to help leaders maximise the benefits and minimise the risks of the technology.
“The pressure created by the COVID-19 outbreak on global trade systems highlights an urgent need for global cooperation to maintain and strengthen the resilience of international supply chains. Resilience in supply chains depends on trust, transparency and integrity, which can be improved through the responsible deployment of blockchain technologies that offer a "shared truth", the WEF said.
Why blockchain? Because it is regarded as the next disruption in the technology world and is being studied in a large number of applications, business sectors and processes. Blockchain is capable of secure handling and storing of administrative records and digital authentication to reinforce intellectual property rights and patent systems. It also brings transparency throughout the supply chain, lowers food frauds and enhances food safety.
As a digital distributed ledger technology and maintained by a network of multiple computing machines, blockchain provides a decentralization to the food supply chain management. It has also become an effective technology due to its transparent nature that eliminates the need of a third-party to mediate or enhance trust between two parties involved in the transaction.