2.1 Hyperledgers
In the food and agriculture industry, permissioned blockchain frameworks
(such as Hyperledger) grant users specific rights over records (i.e.,
more centralised governance) and are built on a specific family of
open-source distributed ledger frameworks. HyperLedger creates a
consortium chain through a channel and uses membership service providers
(MSPs) to control the permissions of nodes. Channels are independent
communication channels between members that members belonging to them
can only see transactions sent in them29.
Within the Hyperledger family, Fabric (the platform on which IBM’s
blockchain is built) and Sawtooth enable industries to build their own
permissioned blockchain networks30are the most common frameworks. The IBM Farmer Connect blockchain
platform, which is underpinned by the Hyperledger framework has been
deployed by coffee manufacturers to establish the provenance of their
coffee. For instance, UCC Coffee’s Orangutan coffee can now be traced
back to its Indonesian origin using farmer connect’s ‘Thank My Farmer’31.
Walmart also deployed IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric framework to improve food
safety transparency and ensure complete end-to-end traceability32.
A number of companies have committed to exploring the use of blockchain
technology in food safety management and implementing it via the
Hyperledger framework. Along with Wal-Mart, Alibaba and JD.com are
implementing blockchain food traceability projects and using blockchain
technology to track the entire process of food production, processing,
and sale. Applied Hyperledger blockchain technology to food supply chain
management in 2016 by Wal-Mart, Tsinghua University, and IBM as a pilot
study to explore practical applications of blockchain technology. The
studies explored the pork supply chain in China and the mango supply
chain in the U.S. As part of a partnership with IBM, the 10 largest food
and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) suppliers, including Wal-Mart,
Nestle, Dole, and Golden Food, integrated blockchain into its supply
chain to detect food suppliers’ misconduct more quickly. IBM’s
Hyperledger blockchain platform is being used in this partnership to
help food companies improve the visibility and traceability of their
supply chains and ensure food safety28.
Hyperledger is a private distributed ledger technology (DLT) that can
facilitate agricultural commodity traceability, which begs the question
of what it is and what are its pros and cons. It does so by making farm
activities and produce histories easily accessible to consumers,
tracking the transportation of products by carriers up until delivery,
and facilitating the recording of farm activities by farmers. Farming
environments are logged using IoT, and the quality of farms during
plantation is analyzed33.
Two of the most developed Hyperledger frameworks (for permissioned and
permissionless blockchain networks) are Fabric (for permissioned
blockchain networks) and Sawtooth (for permissioned blockchain
networks). In addition to a variety of smart contract languages, these
frameworks are enterprise-grade technologies utilised by many
businesses, developers, and users. In particular, IBM supports
Hyperledger Fabric. In comparison with the more popular Hyperledger
Fabric, Sawtooth is the most powerful and robust blockchain framework,
allowing for seamless interoperability with other blockchains17.
Figure 4 shows the scheme of using Hyperledger within supply chains