How can blockchain help us ensure ethically-made, sustainable and high-quality food supplies? Two schemes show us how
From the Fishcoin blog - a value chain in Indonesia
The promise of blockchain for generating social alternatives seems to have boiled down to this feature: its digital capacity for reliably tracking the status of material objects and projects within a production and consumption system, so that their status can be measured and determined at any moment.
This could help with pricing in the externalities - the waste product - generated by any commodity. This would compel zero-carbon accounting, but also - as a means to this end - push products towards reuse, durability and repairability, than just disposability.
Our friend Vinay Gupta has been holding out this possibility for Ethereum/Mattereum for a few years now (see his contributions on this blog). But the idea is spreading around.
What’s interesting is that food sectors are really seizing these opportunities. They’re using blockchain systems not just to demonstrate the provenance of their products, but also to crate digital currencies within those systems, which reward good behaviour by their members.
Two examples today:
Restoring food quality with Holochain
The Holochain makers (again, well covered here) want to design operating systems that empower communities and organisations to create new markets and valuable relationships - ones that don’t rely on central banks, but which also allow for a lot of creativity and customisation for local conditions. In this, code functions like language - where rules are necessary for functioning, but can be remade and reinvented.
They’ve recently tried to make it concrete in this Medium post, by addressing some core challenges for food production. The proliferation of ethical trademarks for food (FairTrade, OrganicSoil, etc) have been a response to the exploitative and secretive behaviour of what they writers call Big Ag (Big Agriculture).
Consumers who don’t want to be addicted or poisoned seek these trade marks out - and it’s a massive labour of credibility and verification for these labels to earn the trust of those consumers. Foodmakers themselves must see some kind of advantage in raising their produce to this standard.
Could blockchain software help to make this verification, all the way up and down the value chain, easier, more reliable and as beneficial as possible? The Holochain writers tell us of one new start-up trying to do just this:
… This new system directly incorporates regenerative certification into the very economics of food production. By meeting standards within the JustOne Organics Living Economy System (JOOLES), growers gain not only valuable contracts to sell their grade-B produce known as “seconds”, they also get access to interest-free credit lines they can use to increase their growing capacity.
Credit limits are determined by a formula that takes into account the metrics from their produce’s spectroscopic analysis, so farmers are directly incentivized to improve the quality of the food they grow.
JOOLES will provide a food-backed cryptocurrency based on the unenclosable carrier Holochain, which means that the currency can never be centralized. Thus, it’s the participants in the ecosystem who issue credit — the holders of the currency, rather than big banks — effectively paying qualifying farmers ahead of their seasons for the food they grow.
FishCoin - sharing data from the point of harvest to the point of consumption
FishCoin has been building for a few years, and has a bustling blog with many of their projects. They face the challenge of a fragmented, overfished seafood industry:
89% of fish stocks are at capacity: At present, 89% of global wild fish stocks are overfished or being fully exploited.
50%+ of seafood is thrown away: As much as 60% of the seafood we take from the ocean is discarded, lost or wasted in supply chains.
700KG of seafood are stolen every second: Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing accounts for more than 700KG stolen each and every second.
“More and more, people want to know the story of their seafood” - and Fishcoin want to use blockchain, and its capacity to generate currencies internal to its system, to verify that story. The process is about giving fishermen clear incentives to provide accurate information about the stocks they are harvesting. These come in the form of a “stable coin”, a digital currency, which is granted to those fishermen who are the most assiduous in their data-entry.
One of the FishCoin blogs, a field trip to Sidoarjo, Indonesia, shows how this might work (see the video, left). The traders box their produce as usual, but fill out accurate information about its provenance and type.
Their reward for doing so is instantaneous - a donation in FishCoins that adds credit to their mobile phone data plans. T
he hope of both FishCoin and JOOLES is that with enough operators on their networks, the worth of these digital coins can grow to the level of providing very-low-cost investment credit to these operators.
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We are always interested in the blockchain realm. The idea of communities being able to construct their own systems of value and pricing, for the assets they have and the resources they find valuable, always seems an admirable goal - and one which is given impetus by the computation behind blockchains.
Our concern is always that there is enough cultural and social commitment and trust, from the real-world communities, to make these systems work.
Is it really boosting mobile phone accounts that will provide an incentive for a fishing community to put in useful data - or some kind of prior commitment that they might manage their resource better, as a sustainable commons?
We note, in closing, that the great theorist of the contemporary “commoning” movement, David Bollier, has warm words to say about Holochain, in his and Silke Helfrich’s Free, Fair and Alive book (p.328, book available as PDF here):
Holochain could tbe used by people to create both monetary and non-monetary currencies that embody new patterns of coordination for social organisms.
Instead of privileging market valuations through prices and income, for example, Holochain could make visible reputation, skills, performance levels, or other flows of value within a community. This would enable distributed, peer-to-peer communities to build and share productive value on their own terms, including models that relationalize property and limit capital accumulation.
Arthur Brock, one of the cofounders of the MetaCurrency Project, which has developed Holochain, explains that the real purpose of a currency should be to make the flow of value visible, as in a “current-see.” Conventional money, as designed and used, cannot express important types of value, which Brock and his associates regard as a profound problem of the modern age.
Dollars, euros, and other state currencies don’t let us see the flows of value that matter most—ecological flows, the social relationships of gift economies, people’s contributions to commons.
It is envisioned that Holochain-based currencies will be used by communities to make visible the community-minded acts that build a reputation, for example, and to create mutual credit monetary systems, without simply establishing new forms of speculative, profit-seeking trade.
The capital accumulation and Governing-through-Money that is routine in the capitalist economy could be re-engineered to set community limits on private accumulation and assure basic fairness in economic exchange.
Holochain-based currencies are more equipped to actualize commons-friendly types of systems because they are based on a principle of mutual sovereignty — shared control by both the individual and the communities to which they belong.