Food Traceability By Cardano Whitepaper

Transform the agri-food systems to improve the living conditions of small farmers

The problem.

The agri-food systems are under tremendous pressure. By 2050, the world’s population is estimated to increase to about 9.7 billion. Feeding it will require increasing current food production in the context of climate change and unsustainable exploitation of natural resources.

To meet this challenge, agri-food systems must become more productive, transparent and sustainable, small farmers will have to adopt new agricultural production processes and, in turn, deal with limited access to information, agricultural assets, financing and markets. The small farmers worldwide, often receive only a small fraction of the final market value of their produce. At their worst, inequities like these manifest as extreme poverty among farmers as well as human rights abuses at the farm-level in the form of slavery, child labour, and hazardous work environments.

The actual agri-food systems also place undue pressures on the environment. Agri-food supply chains contribute 26% greenhouse gasses while using 50% habitable land and 70% of freshwater. Moreover, agriculture is the largest contributor to the loss of biodiversity on Earth.The integrity of agri-food supply chains is often compromised through food safety incidents resulting from adulteration, dilution, tampering, or counterfeiting. Food fraud results in damages of up to $40 billion annually. Worse, the source of the problem is often not easily identifiable given the opacity of supply chains.

The above issues underline the common challenge of ensuring traceability and transparency in agri-food supply chains. Thus we focus on digital tools based on the blockchain that can best solve this issue. We are building highly scalable and inter-operatible technological products based on permissionless Proof of stake blockchain Cardano. Living Roots main development is a public traceability platform that allows any stakeholders to participate using blockchain wallet and tokens.