Blockchain Technology – The Tool For Revolutionize the Agri-Food Supply Chain

In today's constantly transforming world, agriculture management, as well as other economic sectors, is becoming more complex. For instance, supply chains are getting longer, also the number of intermediaries, documents request and the parties involved in the transactions, rises. For these reasons, it is increasingly becoming difficult for the consumer to understand the traceability process of food products. Traceability is come to be the crucial factor in agri-food supply chain. In this procedure often appear the problems regarded to the real quality of food product, to increasising inefficiency of production process and to the increasing risk of fraud and adulteration. Currently, Blockchain technology (BCT) is recognized as a significant tool to solve these problems and reduce the transaction costs as well. Thus, the aim of this paper is to analyze the different means and ways how to solve principally the traceability of food supply chain problems using Blockchain technology in conjunction with advanced technologies like Big data, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), IoT (Internet of Things), AI (Artificial Intelligence) and other related technologies. In order to reach the purpose of the paper, recent academic literature is reviewed. Despite being a hot topic and therefore the increasing interest by different public and private parties, the BCT continues to be far away from being well understood. Currently, there is no clear or fair scale to measure its capabilities and outcomes, or to understand how BCT can be used to enhance agricultural and food systems with their different categories. Blockchain can benefit consumers as well, by minimizing the food contamination risks, and giving them the ability to know accurately the origin of the products. Indeed, Blockchain technology can create accurate fixed data that is locked in time, for all needs and purposes. Recently, blockchain technology has promising potential in three main areas of Agriculture, including Real Time Management, Supply Chain, and Mobile Payment and Financing. Another field that blockchain has a promising effect on is the food waste, especially knowing that one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption (about 1.3 billion metric tons) gets lost or wasted. Through advances in blockchain technology we have an opportunity to incorporate more accuracy into the system, putting an end to processes that allow viable produce to go to waste. Finally, it has also to be mentioned that BCT has a deep connection with algorithmic manipulation of data (consensus), peer-to-peer networks and publicly available standards and open source tools (e.g. Hyperledger Project, Ethereum) holding the huge potential to transform just about every industry. In this regard, agri-food sector may foster the open governance required for the success of this technology, being already committed to digitalization and actively using ICT tools such as IoT (Internet of Thing in precision agriculture), BGA (Big Data Analysis for mastering the huge quantity of data produced by daily measurements), etc.