Opinion of: Fraser Edwards, co -founder and CEO, Cheqd
Brutal honesty has its place, so special when it confronts discomfort, so here there is one that cannot be sweet with honey: 96% of the honey imported in the United Kingdom is false! The evidence found that 24 or 25 bottles were suspicious or did not meet the regulatory standards.
Auto-Sobrain identity (SSI) can solve this.
The United Kingdom Food Standards Agency and the European Commission urge the reform to address this concern by creating a solid traceability database within the networks of the supply chain to guarantee transparency and consumer’s confidence. The data, however, are not the problem. The problem is that people manipulate with him.
This is not the first time that the products are revealed are not authentic, with the authenticity network of honey, highlighting that one third of all honey products were false in 2020, a fraudulent industry that amounts to Eurose ($ 3.65 million and $ 3.65 million, and $ 3.65, and $ 3.65, and $. As reported by the European Commission.
What is Ema and how does honey affect?
Economically motivated adulteration (EMA) intentionally replaces valuable ingredients with less expectations, such as sweets or low quality oil. This practice leads to serious economic and health complications, and, in some cases, diseases, due to poisonous additives of substitute products.
Adulteration implies creating a minimum nutritional value of ultra simulated mixture, and falsifiers call it … love.
Scammers dilute the product with high fructose corn. These adulterants closely mimic the chemical profile of honey, which makes it extremely difficult to detect with traditional tests, such as mass spectrometry of the relationship of affairs. False honey lacks the essential enzymes that give real honey and nutrients. To worsen things, the characteristics of honey vary according to the sources of nectar, the harvest season, geography and more.
Some companies filter pollen content, a key identifier of the geographical origin of a honey, before exporting it to intermediate countries such as Vietnam or India to further obfuscate the process. Once this is done, the products are taken to the shelves of the supermarkets and are labeled with false certifications to command higher prices. This tactic exploits the fact that many regulatory bodies lack the average of verifying each shipment.
The hidden cost of food fraud
The supply chain is deeply fractured, since a honey bottle goes from six to eight key points in the supply chain before it reaches the United Kingdom shelves. Current practices make authenticity verification extremely difficult. Together with the inefficient paper -based desktop Cracy that makes it difficult to track attempts in the intermediary country, we cannot reliably determine the true range of food fraud.
An estimate of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) suggests that 1% of the global food industry, potentially up to $ 40 billion per year, is affected, and could be simply higher.
Recent: wIs the hat decentralized in blockchain?
Fraudulent practices not only damage consumers: they destroy the livelihoods of beekeepers, flood the market and destroy the profitability of legitimate merchants. Ziya Sahin, a Turkish beekeeper, explained frustration with the regulation of food fraud:
“Our beekeepers are angry, and ask why we are not doing something to stop it. But we have no authority to inspect,” he said. “I am not equally allowed to ask street vendors if their honey is real.”
While there is an increasing appetite for more reliable tests and a stricter application, the solutions are lagging behind. The last EU attempt to solve this? Digital products passports are designed to track Honey’s origins and composition, but they are already criticized as ineffective and easy to manipulate, which finally leaves the open so that the fraud continues.
EU passports are an ineffective solution
The passport of digital products of the European Union aims to address this improving traceability and transparency in its supply chains. By 2030, all products in the EU must have a Digital Pass prot that presents information on the life cycle of products, origins and environmental effects.
While the idea sounds promising, it does not recognize to what extent the scammers can forge certificates and obscure the origins when it passes products through intermediate countries next to the officials who are a blind eye.
In the center of this problem is trust. Although the story shows that the rules can be folded and be folded, we trust governments to implement laws and regulations. Technology, on the other hand, is agnostic and does not care about money or incentives.
This is the fundamental defect of the EU approach: a system based on human supervision that is vulnerable to corruption by which these supply chains are already known.
Self -sufficient identity (SSI) for products
Many people are already aware of the scalability trilema, but the trusted triangle is a key concept in SSI that defines how trust is established between emitters, headlines and verifiers. Makes fraud much more challenging that each product must be supported by a verifiable credential of a reliable source to prove that it is real.
The emitters, as manufacturers or certification agencies, create and sign verifiable credentials that certify the authenticity of a product. The owner, usually the owner of the product, stores and presents thesis credentials when necessary. Verifiers, such as retailers, customs or consumers officials, can verify the validity of credentials without depending on a central authority.
Verifiable credentials are protected by cryptography. If some try to sell false products, their missing or invalid credentials will immediately reveal fraud.
Government reforms must extend beyond the current regulatory supervision and explore the approach described in the trust trilema to safeguard the supply chains of adulteration and generalized fraud.
SSI provides the underlying infrastructure necessary to reliably track the identity of products in multiple bodies, standards and regions. When enabling the handling of manipulations, end -to -end in each product, whether it is a honey bottle or a SSI of designer bags, ensures that sufficient validators confirm that the data is correct to address fraud and obfuscation attempts.
SSI also empowers consumers to independently verify products without depending on third -party databases. Buyers can scan the product to authenticate their origin and history directly through cryptographic certifications confirmed by validators to further reduce the risk of erroneous information, even if it reaches the shelves. This would also help reduce corruption and inefficiencies, since many paper verifications are made, which can be easily altered and is a slow process.
As honey fraud methods continue to expand, so do the damage of these products to consumers and local companies. The tasks of the steps to address thesis methods must also also the brothers. EU digital products passports are aimed at improving traceability; But unfortunately, they do not reach the sophistication of the scammers. The implementation of SSI is a necessary step to address the extension that the scam takes to ensure that their product reaches the shelves.
Opinion of: Fraser Edwards, co -founder and CEO, Cheqd.
This article is for general information purposes and does not intend to be and should not be tasks such as legal or investment advice. The views, the thoughts and opinions expressed here are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the opinions and opinions of Cointelegraph.
