Product provenance verification takes time and can be costly. Is capturing and sharing chemometric signatures of all things the answer? Unfortunately not.
Claiming to be '100% pure' or 'clean and green' is just another marketing slogan without data, evidence and science to back it up. There are extraordinary opportunities to more strategically leverage these capabilities to underwrite the value of our export brand promise. We are fortunate in Australia and New Zealand to have so many world-leading researchers and practitioners - experts in the art of forensic product provenance verification.
So, what should we be focusing on then and how can blockchain advocates like me help? It’s quite simple. To unlock the value of blockchain and related technology, including tokens, we need to tackle the identification problem. We need to distinguish between data provenance and product provenance.įor readers interested in the latter, I encourage you to review a great series of interviews recorded by John Keogh (Toronto, Canada) with international specialists in the field. Again, it is misleading, especially when communicating with people who are grappling with blockchain as a concept, to imply that a token (a made-up virtual thing) representing a unique physical object of value has solved the challenge of supply chain traceability. There is a reason that unique pieces of art are often used as an example of not fungible tokens and blockchain at work. This example is used because unique pieces of art are relatively easy to identify. Has confusion and the enigma surrounding blockchain created a false sense of security that things are more simple than they really are? That somehow the challenge of maintaining physical-digital twins has become easier?
We need to clearly define the limitations and vulnerabilities of methods used to match physical things of value with their digital counterparts (a number, a code or a token). We need to be clear about assumptions made when promoting blockchain as a solution for supply chain traceability. I am wondering if this is instilling you with confidence? We created a token to represent something that is hard to uniquely identify. Wikipedia defines token as ‘a thing serving as a visible or tangible representation of a fact, quality, feeling, etc’.
To overcome the problem of knowing which fish or silo full of grain we are talking about, we invented tokens. We all assume that unique identification is possible and, because it’s so obviously important, that it's being done, by everyone, everywhere.
Here is our challenge. It is easy to gloss over the importance of uniquely identifying things. We rely on these 'containers' and it's impractical and often impossible to identify the contents - especially for low-value items and commodities like rice, wheat, sugar or milk and other liquids. Our typical product identifiers are proxies - they sit on the outside of packaging materials, cartons and pallets. We know that labels are easy to copy or substitute. It's no different from our current challenge identifying a product or consignment traded today. We rely on independent test certificates and declarations to help manage the complexity. For example, it is hard to tell one litre of milk or water from another, a grain of rice or sugar crystals from one farm, region, country or another. The inconvenient truth is that blockchains require a digital representation of physical things to be paired (sometimes called digital twins). This entanglement is an abstraction, and in some cases, it is impractical or impossible. While always optimistic and not wanting to come across as a soothsayer, doomsdayer or crackpot, I am fearful that important lessons may not have been learned. If in doubt, please read article 7 explaining why something like blockchain is needed to ensure we don't repeat mistakes made in the early part of the century that resulted in a global financial crisis. So what is the inconvenient truth about blockchain? If you have been reading earlier New Voodoo articles you should have hopefully noted that I am actually a blockchain advocate.