A review on blockchain applications in the agri‐food sector

BACKGROUND Food security can benefit from the technology's transparency, relatively low transaction costs and instantaneous applications. A blockchain is a distributed database of records in the form of encrypted blocks, or a public ledger of all transactions or digital events that have been ex...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of the science of food and agriculture Vol. 99; no. 14; pp. 6129 - 6138
Main Authors: Antonucci, Francesca, Figorilli, Simone, Costa, Corrado, Pallottino, Federico, Raso, Luciano, Menesatti, Paolo
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Chichester, UK John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 01.11.2019
John Wiley and Sons, Limited
Subjects:
Agribusiness
Agricultural production
Agriculture
Agriculture - economics
artificial intelligence
Blockchain
communications technology
Computer applications
computer software
Computer Systems - trends
Computers
Contracts
Cryptography
distributed database
Farms
Food
Food chains
food industry
Food Industry - economics
Food processing industry
Food security
Food supply
food supply chain
ICT
infrastructure
IoT
Mapping
Network analysis
Organic chemistry
Precision agriculture
Software
supply chain
Supply chains
traceability
distributed database
ICT
supply chain
traceability
artificial intelligence
IoT
ISSN:0022-5142, 1097-0010, 1097-0010
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:BACKGROUND Food security can benefit from the technology's transparency, relatively low transaction costs and instantaneous applications. A blockchain is a distributed database of records in the form of encrypted blocks, or a public ledger of all transactions or digital events that have been executed and shared among participating parties and can be verified at any time in the future. Generally, the robust and decentralized functionality of the blockchain is used for global financial systems, but it can easily be expanded to contracts and operations such as tracking of the global supply chain. In the precision agriculture context, Information and Communications Technology can be further implemented with a blockchain infrastructure to enable new farm systems and e‐agriculture schemes. RESULTS The purpose of this review is to show a panorama of the scientific studies (enriched by a terms mapping analysis) on the use of blockchain in the agri‐food sector, from both an entirely computational and an applicative point of view. As evidenced by the network analysis, the reviewed studies mainly focused on software aspects (e.g. the architecture and smart contracts). However, some aspects regarding the different blockchain knots (computers always connected to the blockchain network) having the role to store and distribute an updated copy of each block in a food supply‐chain, result of crucial importance. CONCLUSION These technologies appear very promising and rich of great potential showing a good flexibility for applications in several sectors but still immature and hard to apply due to their complexity. © 2019 Society of Chemical Industry
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ISSN:0022-5142
1097-0010
1097-0010
DOI:10.1002/jsfa.9912