Reduce food crop wastage with hyperledger fabric-based food supply chain

Abstract

Food is the utmost important thing for every living being. The quality and safety of food has become a crucial factor in the food industry. Most of the customers tend to pay more attention to food safety and seek to get food from verifiable resources. To improve this trustworthiness Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) - based Food Supply Chain (FSC) plays a vital role because of its traceability. There are multiple actors involved throughout the journey of FSC and with the high visibility of data in DLT, everyone can ensure trust. The transparency of data itself is a reason for some to opt-out because some of their private data can be exposed to others. Hyperledger Fabric (HF) based FSC can address that matter as it supports permissioned network solutions. Though there are a lot of solutions available in a similar kind of approach, whether the crops take their journey throughout the FSC without any wastage, is still questionable. This study focuses on reducing wastage of food crops as they take a long journey in their raw state and possible hazards are high. It discusses farmers' behavior based on the Sri Lankan context and how it accompanies food crop wastage. Further, this paper ruminates the other possible crop wastage that can take place in FSC and how to eliminate it with the proper involvement of knowledgeable and authorized parties. Then, the study explores how all the parties can collaboratively join the FSC based on HF so that everyone can benefit. Finally, it concludes on how such design is effectively contributing to reducing food crop wastage in Sri Lanka (SL).