The United States to Check IBM Blockchain for Agricultural Food Exports

IBM is seriously designing a blockchain proof-of-concept (PoC) for an agency of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) called the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), which will enable it to assess how distributed ledger technology (DLT) can fully enhance important regulation services especially export certification systems.

As revealed by the FSIS representative, huge sums of money which is more than $269,450 has been dedicated for blockchain and DLT viability assessment and will discover productivities, effectiveness and competence in an exercise blemished by rules and frequent multifaceted, multi-territory documented rations.

The agency is accountable at confirming that the U.S.’s agricultural products such as exported beef, chicken and other poultry products are satisfactorily up to the required grades; and this implies that inspecting the products against the set national standards, and to the standards of the where the goods are to be exported to. This project is one part of the USDA’s import-export innovation program, as indicated in the 2020 Yearly Plan.

Hegemony in DLT

Inspectors from the USDA validate all the presented information including the documents, IDs, stamps, brands, distribution vessels plus a small mockup of the exported good itself to see whether they meet both the domestic and broad set of rules and guidelines, as shown by the inspector training manual. The deriving manual and electronic paper track go together with goods in shipment. 

The PoC will ascertain whether or not DLT can introduce “augmented  tamper-proof and discernibility of important documents and certification passing through the entire logistics network, as remarked by the FSIS envoi.

Also, the agency will begin by seriously reviewing the “export business process.” And this scenario really shows that America is highly interested in the utilization of DLTs not only in the agriculture and food dept. but also in other various sectors. And indeed the superpower nation - United States - wants to keep dominating the world even in the DLT and cryptocurrency side, however, other states such as China are trying to break this hegemony.