Blockchain to Revolutionize Regulation, Food and Beverage Sectors in Australia

Australia is investing huge sums of money to support blockchain innovations in the country.

The technology is becoming highly used to do complex roles in different private and public departments. The Australian government wants to use blockchain to reduce costs incurred in regulatory compliance, as well as to optimize supply chains of critical minerals, food and beverages.

The government has allocated about $6 million to blockchain teams to develop solutions or ways of how to use the technology in minerals certification and tracking excise taxation in the food and beverage industry. But which benefits will the distributed ledger technology (DLT) bring in the above fields?

Blockchain can help reduce the cost of regulatory compliance

The Australian government invested about $5.3 million USD to the DISER (Dept of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources) to research the role DLT can play in the area of regulation. Some of the regulatory bodies in Australia include; the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), the Reserve Bank of Australia, and the Australian Treasury. These watchdogs are in charge of boosting a just, transparent and potent monetary system for the firms, organizations and citizens.

For instance, ASIC spent over about $691,877 in 2019/20 and around $112,410 in 2018/19 on regulation works. Blockchain enables cheap transactions, and can be used by many officials in charge of regulations without the need of moving here and there to monitor goods or services being regulated. So if blockchain is deployed, it can help to bring down the sum spent on regulations.

Blockchain helps to prevent foodborne diseases

Blockchain technology can help food and beverages firms to map their supply chain and offer customers with exact data about the products. While using the DLT to trace all the activities that happened in the logistics networks, it becomes easy for the firms to spot the cause of source of contamination. This ultimately helps companies to develop measures of controlling and combating pathogens and foodborne diseases such as E.coli, Norovirus, Hepatitis A, Salmonella and others.

The use of blockchain technology in the food and beverage sector supply chain will help the companies to connect with better suppliers and the suppliers will have to provide that data concerning provenance of their quality. 

Therefore, DLT will be used to build a digital and transparent marketplace where suppliers can securely and quickly link up with their customers and bid on particular projects depending on the information they provided in the blockchain network about quality.