Can Blockchain Be a Basis to Ensure Transparency in an Agricultural Supply Chain?

Abstract

Many supply chains within developing countries lack transparency and are fraught with fraud, corruption, and a substantial number of intermediaries. For several decades, the cocoa sector has faced multiple social, economic, and environmental challenges, some of which include the issue of child labor and very low incomes for farmers, leading to poor living conditions. Blockchain technology has a high potential to reduce—or completely eradicate—some of these hurdles. In this article, we present a blockchain-based solution based on the open-source framework Hyperledger Fabric for the cocoa supply chain to promote transparency and reduce fraud. In doing so, we explicitly describe how farmers can be directly integrated into the whole blockchain solution considering the limited infrastructure, knowledge, and technologies available to them. Since about 70% of all cocoa worldwide is produced in West Africa, this case study uses the cocoa sector in Ghana as an example.