So much has happened in the field of emerging epidemics and infectious diseases over these three months, including a resurgence of concern about the health and societal impact of tuberculosis and pneumonic plague in Africa. Focusing, however, on recent times, the past week was marked by interest in blockchain technology for preventing foodborne diseases. A blockchain is a distributed database that maintains a growing list of records reinforced against tampering and revision. It consists in a chain of data blocks, which can be used to prove ownership of a record at a certain time, by including a one-way hash of any transaction affecting the chain. In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto – the legendary designer of the Bitcoin algorithm - described blockchain as “a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust”. Indeed, blockchain is growing in popularity also thanks to the cultural climate of distrust towards institutions, authorities, and experts.
On Nov 6, the Walmart Food Safety Collaboration Center (WFSCC) awarded the project “OriginTrail” with the Walmart 2017 Food Safety Innovation Award. OriginTrail is a project initiated by a Slovenian-Serbian team in 2014, with the twofold goal of preventing foodborne diseases and food counterfeiting. After three pilots in Europe, in 2016 the project has started a vast trial in China, involving 1,200 farms. According to Walmart’s vice-president, Frank Yiannas, “by tracking how and where the food we sell is produced, blockchain provides new levels of transparency and accountability – responsible systems result in safer food”. Always in China, Walmart and IBM are also developing “blockchain-powered traceability solutions which will enable customers to scan quick-response codes on food products with their smart phones, and determine the origins of the products”. Furthermore, in August 2017,IBM has announced a blockchain collaboration with Dole, Driscoll’s, Golden State Foods, Kroger, McCormick and Company, McLane Company, Nestlé, Tyson Foods, Unilever, with the aim to increase food security. Finally, OwlTing, a Taiwanese e-commerce platform, has just launched its own blockchain app for tracing food. OwlTing’s promises to provide customers with relevant information about the authenticity, quality, and safety of food products, including information of vaccines and medications received by animals.
Blockchain technology could undoubtedly enhance product traceability, because “anyone with access to the blockchain could see exactly what hands the product has been through”. Yet, here is where the problem is. Blockchain technology used by cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin is an open system, it works through and thanks its participants, being a class of them responsible for securing the entries and providing a mechanism for self-rewarding. Active participation is thus incentivized. This system could hardly work with food supply blockchains, not the least because access to supply chains cannot be free and it would be difficult to enforce a direct global rewarding mechanism. As a consequence, food supply blockchains can work only if they are backed by an owner or a group of owners. They are “permissioned”, which means that they are closed and controlled; they are restricted to authorized actors, which are the sole allowed to participate in growing the chain as well as approving the records.
The most relevant aspect of permissioned blockchainsis that they are trustworthy only as long as their owners are trustworthy. In other words, food supply blockchains, far from creating trustless systems, are relocating trust from health authorities to blockchain owners. The final result will be that consumers - who hardly trust now authorities, health institutions, and experts - are going soon to be asked to trust Walmart, IBM, and Nestlé. There is some lesson in this.
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