
Blockchain could fix a key problem in China’s food industry - kartikkumar
https://qz.com/1031861/blockchain-could-fix-a-key-problem-in-chinas-food-industry-the-fear-of-food-made-in-china/
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FooBarWidget
I can't see how this is a solution. The problem isn't whether corruption is
possible, the problem is trust. It's a social problem, not a technical
problem. You can have the most corruption-free system in the world, but normal
people won't understand how it works, nor will they care to verify the system.
They get their trust through their social circle, e.g. "my mother and my
friends say X is reliable while Y is untrustworthy". The more people that
_they_ trust they hear it from, repeatedly, the more they view X as reliable.
The blockchain has no such reputation except possibly among certain techies,
which is a tiny portion of the population.

The blockchain may allow a group of experts to verify truth, but this only
impacts the population at large if somehow the opinions of these experts
propagate to the larger population. _That_ step is a marketing and
communication problem.

For example Nutricia, the company behind the Dutch Nutrilon milk powder that
Chinese are buying en masse, opened factories in China and sold Nutrilon
directly in China. They've been doing this for several years now, yet demand
for Nutrilon produced in the Netherlands remains high. Why? Because people
don't trust that the Nutrilon produced in China is not a scam. Only after mass
marketing campaigns, e.g. hiring celebrities as spokespeople, are people
beginning to trust it.

~~~
mike_hearn
Hey there FBW, long time no see :)

I think you're mis-judging the intended userbase of an app like this. The word
"blockchain" has unfortunately become more and more diluted over time as
people explore use cases further and further away from technology. In some
cases it ends up meaning little more than better living through technology.

Most developed countries have supply chain tracking systems that let
regulators and industry investigate supply chain problems. Mobile apps to let
you find the story of your personal steak are a bit of a gimmick. It's better
to think of these systems as debug logs, intended to let professionals isolate
problems in the pipeline.

These systems are of course only as good as the data that goes into them. They
aren't silver bullets or whole solutions. But if you can get to a situation
where most suppliers are honest, they can help guide investigations towards
the suppliers that are dishonest. The UK horsemeat affair shows how
investigators were able to track down the dishonest suppliers and, crucially,
assemble enough evidence to do something about it.

The simple and obvious way to implement supply chain tracking is a big central
web app with database. But it leads to common problems:

• Who builds this system?

• Who pays for it to be run?

• Can you trust the administrators?

• If an administrator is corrupted, can you recover?

The traditional answers are "the government via a small set of large public
sector IT contractors", "industry via tax" or "industry via payments",
"hopefully" and "no".

You can also get private sector solutions, but these tend to struggle to get
wide adoption because industries fear being held in hock to a monopoly.

These outcomes are not ideal. They aren't standards based or open source,
individual users can't really improve their experience of using the system,
data is concentrated in a single place where it's ripe for hacking and
manipulation, digital signatures are used rarely if at all, and in general
it's just not ideal.

Modern blockchain-inspired systems like Corda, which I work on, are actually
quite different to Bitcoin and Ethereum. Data isn't broadcast everywhere,
there's no mining, etc. If you want you can think of them as document
management systems. You have versioned digitally signed data structures with a
PKI to root signatures in real world identities, a P2P network for businesses
and organisations to run complex workflows over and so on. These are useful
for managing large, distributed data management operations, for managing the
evolution of data across many different parties and so on.

Ultimately, Chinese people will not learn to trust their food through an app.
Instead China will develop the same sorts of largely invisible systems that
create an ambient trust in the food system, and you won't need celebrities
anymore. Software can play a part of that.

~~~
tingbadimalo
This is such a great response. Thinking of blockchains as a decentralized
document management system for managing the evolution of data makes a lot of
sense and really articulates the value proposition of Blockchain.

Thank you for this response.

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myrryr
There is a robust meat certification process in the UK. Every piece of meat
sold has to be able to be traced back to the cow it came from.

The system is centralized, and has many systems in place to stop tampering.

Yet..

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_horse_meat_scandal](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_horse_meat_scandal)

This is the issue, the block chain stops tampering, but does nothing at all to
make sure the data entered into it is valid in any way shape or form.

You are targeting the wrong problem.

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planetjones
I don't get it.

Who are the participants in the blockchain and how do you ensure it cannot be
tampered with i.e. could someone just go back to a previous block and rewrite
history. Difficult admittedly. I don't understand what a consensus means in
this implementation.

Also, it sounds like the trust is completely in the hands of one entity i.e.
the person who adds details about the cow and cut of meat. How is that
trustworthy ?

Either, the article doesn't explain how blockchain could fix a key problem in
China's food industry, or it doesn't fix a key problem.

In my opinion food safety has to be regulated by a central agency like a
Government. A decentral system like Blockchain isn't what solves the problem.
Regulations and process are.

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ethn
As many mention, the system is not infallible because data entry is as safe as
those who control the input of it; it does not increase trust directly.
However, what it does add directly is accountability. If each process, is
suppose, transmitted automatically by NFC bundled crates through the supply
chain, you have a guarantee of the process through the checkpoints (even if it
may deviate) with the information and status of each crate, all the way to the
store. More so, with the variety of information, such as average supply times,
it becomes very difficult to defraud the next check in the supply chain. In
addition, with the transparency of the blockchain the store can better
determine the integrity of the entire process, as the actors now begin to
approach perfect information. Further, now to defraud, becomes much more
expensive as an effect of the checkpoints and metadata; this should further
discourage defrauding.

Even better, with all this accountability, the system does becomes more
trustable; the integrity of each actor is known and can be investigated
independently (i.e. stores and consumers can choose which supply chain they
want to be apart of because of this transparent blockchain). Not to forget,
that with accountability becomes increased shared liability that then aligns
each actor in the supply chain further to constantly check the integrity of
the actors involved––or at least press the risk of an integrity inquiry.

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davidgerard
Why blockchain doesn't solve the actual problem: you literally need human
inspectors who know the scams.
[https://twitter.com/a_ferron/status/896795477844389888](https://twitter.com/a_ferron/status/896795477844389888)

This is just a bad "but with blockchain!!" puff piece. You would probably
believe how many of these I read ... It's "here's a problem!" (problem may or
may not exist) "Blockchain will solve it!!" (it won't even if it does exist)

Note that nothing about the actual problem is automatable - it's not about
tagging the items, it's about the _quality for humans_ of the tagged items.
The blockchain approach relies on the assumption that the current crooks will
suddenly tell the truth when they're entering data into the system, rather
than _e.g._ lying, or bribing inspectors, like they do now.

The only thing that _actually works_ is to (a) give a hoot (an important
prerequisite) (b) directly inspect your suppliers.

 _e.g._ Provenance Inc. is trying to sell this stuff in the UK, but is getting
very little traction, because putting it on a blockchain doesn't solve any of
the actual problem, and their prospective customers (the people in the middle
and end of the supply chains) are going "what on earth, this doesn't solve any
problem we have."

I wrote a book chapter on this ...

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contingencies
I run a foodtech startup in China - [http://infinite-
food.com/](http://infinite-food.com/) \- and previously designed a major
cryptocurrency exchange.

What's the state of the market? If you read, for example, the last annual
general report of _Yum! Brands_ (who run KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and some
other chains in China + have EBITDA ~USD$0.5B/year+) they basically say "yeah,
supply quality issues happen, but basically we can't prevent them even if we
spend up big, so we just do periodic inspections, value win-win long term
relationships with suppliers, and have reasonable levels of paranoia". That's
the reality... and they have more money and lawyers to throw at the problem
than the rest of us.

On the consumer side, they want to know there's low to no pesticide residue on
their veggies and that the meat they're eating is free of hormones and is what
it's supposed to be, but that's not something Blockchain necessarily has
anything to do with as it actually needs a fairly constrictive government or
private sector testing regimen which will cost money and (under user pays)
will rapidly be ignored and sidestepped by the bulk of the market. The reality
is that consumers _can_ buy organic vegetables and imported meat already: they
just don't because it costs more.

IMHO then, in the Chinese market this sort of stuff realistically most
probably falls in to the 'marketing gimmick to make my brand appear more
trustworthy' category ... and is likely quite effective.

~~~
coldcode
Exactly, no matter how reliable the proof in the blockchain is, it's no more
reliable than the data that was encoded in.

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aaron695
Don't get it?

How is it different to a central body with one database where you lookup if
this product has passed all the checks / tells you its lifetime info?

What problem can it help with?

~~~
terhechte
The main advantage is that at the central body, somebody may take bribes to
edit entries after the fact or to tamper the data. With a (proper) blockchain
that's (mostly) impossible.

~~~
hrrsn
How can they attach an ID to a specific food and ensure that it hasn't been
duplicated etc? With crypto, it's easy, but if they're just attaching a label
to a box it seems ripe for fraud.

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patrickk
I wonder if they've experimented with image analysis software to categorise
the carcass at the slaughterhouse. It's done in Ireland to good effect[1] to
grade the carcass to ensure compliance with the European beef grading system
(beef and dairy farming is an important industry in Ireland). It doesn't
guarantee fraud prevention, but it could increase consumer confidence in beef
quality.

[1]
[https://www.agriculture.gov.ie/farmingsectors/beef/eubeefcar...](https://www.agriculture.gov.ie/farmingsectors/beef/eubeefcarcaseclassificationscheme/)

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ninju
So...I'm not sure how this will stop the fraud.

All someone has to do is payoff a data entry clerk to generate the false
backstory and data that is encrypted in the blockchain. In fact, once this
illegitimate data is preserved in the blockchain it will be given _equal_
weight (or at least it should) as other legitimately generated data unless you
have a way to dispute the data stored in the blockchain -- which then means
you now have a __more __authoritative source so why do we need the blockchain

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Ninn
This sound like just another case of misunderstanding the core technology. I
can recommend watching:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMEOKDVXlUo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMEOKDVXlUo)

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epynonymous
probably should rtfa, but all china needs to do is bring back corporal
punishment en masse for those that take lives or sicken others for profit,
blockchains or hyper ledgers with group verification doesnt help.

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omarforgotpwd
So... are there people mining CowCoin to make this all work?

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willejs
Blockchain could fix a key problem in X

