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It's become a new horrible standard. Our marine life is now stifled by the collection of a plastic minefield in our oceans. A rainbow runner fish with a worrisome kaleidoscopic piece of plastic in his liver. A mahi-mahi fish with plastic capsules in the stomach. Or mussels and clams, the filters of the sea, which harbor hidden microplastics, invisible to the naked eye.
Our first reaction to this news is often a disgust. But this reflex gives way quickly to a sober thought: the considerable impact of the eight million tons of plastic pollution that penetrate each year into our oceans. Not just the evidence of our growing ecological mistakes, this disaster is also directly threatening to poison us where we are really vulnerable: our plates.
The prospects for such a future have an impact on our food purchases. Last year, a European survey conducted by the McKinsey & Company research firm on buyers confirmed a long-standing trend: food quality continues to be more important than price. In other words, consumers are very keen on the consumption of safe food and are happy to demonstrate it with their wallet.
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The problem is that our modern industrial food webs keep us away from any knowledge of where our food comes from. In a strange twist of fate, we have become unfathomable in a world oversaturated by information.
All this will soon change. New technologies are helping to fill this information gap and restore the power of knowledge to consumers. By cataloging the long supply chain data trail on encrypted registers, the nebulous world of the global food web will be exposed. Buyers will soon be able to follow the "story of the fish" – a newsletter containing the photo of the product's origin, the place of capture, the initial weight, the type of the species, the details of the ship and the crew, the RFID tag number, the details of the catch, etc.
The foods sold in this system will be more detailed than most of the online products we buy, and downright encyclopaedic compared to online dating profiles.
According to Alfred Cook, tuna program manager for the Western and Central Pacific, the first fish products to be produced and monitored in a transparent way – from the ocean to the point of sale – via these blockchain activated ledgers, will be distributed in supermarkets in New Zealand and in the EU for the World Wildlife Foundation, which works in the project. This breakthrough comes after a pilot project launched in June 2017, supported by the WWF, which hopes that increased transparency of the supply chain will also prevent fish caught by forced labor from unwittingly ending up in our grocery stores.
The union of silos of modern food supply chains is one of the best examples of a real problem that only the blockchain can solve
Geolocation information will show that catches are far from populated coastal areas and that inspection certifications can be downloaded to demonstrate that the product has pbaded quality checks.
Since Bitcoin's boom and bust period in 2017-2018, blockchain technology, the foundation of cryptocurrencies, has led to an overwhelming hype. Today there are countless startups around the world looking for ways to apply obscure methods of decentralized and encrypted ledgers to disrupt the activities of small and large businesses. Most are gadgets.
This one, however, feels different. The union of silos of modern food supply chains is one of the best examples of a real problem that only the blockchain can solve, and which promises to have an impact on the average consumer sooner than later.
"The traditional supply chain relies on relationships and a complete lack of information from one actor to another," said Brett Haywood, New Zealand's chief executive of Sea Quest Fiji. , the tuna fishing and processing company involved in the pioneering program.
"We know what we sell our fish, but we do not know what the next actor gets as a margin. On one side, it is not up to us to know why the fish is sold down the supply chain, but on the other hand, we are subject to the inefficiency of actors down this chain, "he explains.
"Even if it has taken longer, the disruption of traditional supply chains will be no less important, as the primary producer will be able to get closer to the end consumer," Haywood said.
The technological infrastructure of this project has existed for several years and it is likely that you have already experienced it. Innovative efforts were made in New Zealand and Australia in 2015 and 2016, and similar projects soon followed, including in Miami.
Scale tracing is almost an impossible task – Tyler Mulvihull
These programs have never provided much details. Using automated identification technologies, such as radio frequency identification tags and 2D barcodes, grocery retailers have provided consumers with instantaneous data on the origin of food and beverage products. product via smartphone apps. But until now, we lacked complete data on where our food comes from. Our modern supply chains have had too many isolated moving parts to badimilate.
"We spend a lot of time reconciling information between organizations because each person keeps their own copy of the database," says Tyler Mulvihill, co-founder of Viant, the Brooklyn-based company that builds the software on the Ethereum public block chain. .
Why is this technology even necessary?
"End-to-end traceability is extremely difficult to do without blockchain because you have siled data systems and if one of these strings breaks, the whole system breaks down," Mulvihill replied. "It is almost impossible to treat on a large scale," he added.
However, conscientiously lifting the heart of the workings of a company will not be a sensible decision for many CEOs. The modern business world does not encourage greater transparency and changing the old way of doing things can take a considerable time. Just think of a vertically integrated business: if you bring out the most intimate details of your product, you expose yourself to direct competitors. This is often not the wisest choice.
"The problem is that this information is controlled by what supply chain actors want to share and that there must be a revolution to change that," says Haywood. "I believe blockchain technology is the catalyst [to change]create a relationship (at least based on knowledge) between the consumer and the primary producer. "
The idea of where your food comes from is a privilege for those who are more or less economically secure – Robyn Metcalfe
Marketing campaigns will force change, of course, as buyers naturally expect more transparency in their food. Still, even though the future will require more businesses to connect to publicly available great books, it must be said that this technology is really there to solve a rich "first world problem".
"The idea of where your food comes from is a privilege for those who are more or less economically secure," Robyn Metcalfe, director of Food + City at the University of Texas in Austin. . "Many urban dwellers have a more basic need for food and therefore have no basic interest in knowing where it comes from. If we only talk about those who are food secure, of course, there are technologies that they have the time and resources to take advantage of. "
She anticipates that applications offering food information will not fail, and that they will become more and more sophisticated every day.
"Interacting with your food will become a thing," says Metcalfe. "This connection does not necessarily mean that people will have more power; Learn more about your food may be a convenience and, in some cases, a form of entertainment. "
In a world where the habitats of our seafood products are increasingly under threat, such technologies could become a prerequisite for quality-conscious buyers. But a flood of new information does not guarantee a change in evolution, as many emerging technologies have often taught us, and such progress will always depend on the quality of our education.
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