Distributed Ledger Technology for Agri-Food Supply Chain Management

Distributed Ledger Technology for Agri-Food Supply Chain Management In today's constantly transforming world, agriculture management, as almost all other fields, is becoming more complex, the supply chains are getting longer as there is a need of intermediaries, and also number of documents and their copies for all parties involved in the transactions are getting enormous. It is becoming difficult to understand the provenance of the product also. A numerous transparency and efficiency issues in agricultural supply chains ultimately put farmers and consumers at a disadvantage. So, traceability becomes the crucial factor in agri-food supply chain, that means the ability to trace and follow the history of final product forward or backward in the supply chain, to have an information on all stages of production process, warehousing, distribution and trade. Consequently, there is a need of the system that simplifies the processes, increase the efficiency of production process and reduce the risk of fraud and adulteration. DLTs (Distributed Ledger Technologies) and particularly BCT (Blockchain technology) 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 look to different means and ways, how food problems can be solved by application of Blockchain technology in the agri-food supply chain. 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 and there is no clear or fair scale to measure its capabilities and outcomes, or to understand how blockchain technology can be used to enhance agricultural and food systems with their different categories. Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) have the capability to be used these systems to provide enhanced data integrity and security without the help of a third-party organization. They have the potential to advance the global food system by improving the trust, transparency and traceability, and consequently the efficiency of agri-food supply chain. So, Blockchain can benefit consumers with minimizing the food contamination risks, and giving them the ability to track accurately the source of the products. Indeed, Blockchain technology can create accurate fixed data that is locked in time, for all needs and purposes. On the other hand, implementation of Blockchain Technology in the field meets some difficulties. BCT hardly depends on the advances of computer sciences and commercial applications in the field as it uses merger of technologies such as cryptography, hash functions, distributed databases, consensus algorithms, and decentralized processing. In addition, application of BCT needs an internet connection which can still be a challenge in some developing countries, and it requires also the digital skills of the companies. In this regard, agri-food sector will deal with less challenges because of progresses in digitalization, already implemented and actively used ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) and BDA (Big Data Analysis) tools, etc. So, this sector has a great potential to attempt the capability of BCT. Keywords: Distributed Ledger Technology, Blockchain, Agri-food, supply chain