Fair Trading of Crops in a Trusted and Transparent Manner using Smart Contracts

Abstract

In the past few years, Indian farmers face problems due to middlemen’s excessive exploitation in several ways. Intermediaries play a vital role as a bridge between farmers and consumers, due to the existence of several layers of commission agents or mediators(middlemen) who are buying crops from farmers at least possible cost and sell those at extravagant prices which monetary abuse both the farmers and consumers. The government has already tried plentiful various schemes, yojanas, and online solutions to clear up the obstacles, occur in the process of buying and selling produce. However, every technique to unfold the root problems was either short term or not up to the mark. Hence, it is necessary to provide a trusted, transparent, and decentralized solution. Therefore, this paper proposed a Blockchain-based framework that eliminated the agriculture sector’s intermediates, specifically for crop trade. Additionally, we integrated Blockchain with the Android application to provide an easy interface and maximize user satisfaction. The proposed strategy makes it easy for farmers to sell their products to nationwide buyers, which provides them a reasonable allowance according to the input cost and the inflation rates, respectively, and it also creates a trusted wide marketplace to sell their crops. Through this, by exhibiting just a single layer in trade, the social and monetary welfare of farmers, consumers and government are targeted. We created several Smart Contracts and deployed to a Blockchain Network of Hyperledger Fabric Platform and then measured the performance using Hyperledger Caliper benchmark.