Opinion by: Fraser Edwards, Co-Founder and CEO, Cheqd
Brutal loyalty has its place, especially when talking to discomfort, so here’s one that can’t be sweet with honey: 96% of that imported honey in the UK is fake! Tests found that 24 to 25 jars were Damn it or not achieved regulatory standards.
Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) can fix it.
The UK Food Standards Agency and the European Commission both encourage reform to deal with this concern by creating a stable tracking Database Inside the supply chain networks to ensure consumer transparency and trust. However, the data is not the problem. The issue is that people are talking to it.
This is not the first time the products are expressed inAuthentic, with the Honey Authenticity Network Highlighting One-third of all honey products fake in 2020, a deceptive industry value Up to 3.4 billion euros ($ 3.65 million) of fake goods entering the EU in 2023, as reported by the European Commission.
What is EMA, and how does it affect honey?
Economical motivated adulteration (EMA) involves Intentionally replacement of essential ingredients for less expensive products such as sweeteners or low quality oils. This training leads to serious economic and health complications – and, in some cases, diseases – due to toxic additives from replacement products.
Adulteration often involves the creation of an ultra-diluted blend that contains a small amount of nutrition, and the fakes call it… honey.
Fraudsters Dilute the product with high fructose corn syrup or increase starch or gelatine thickness. These adulterants closely mimic honey chemical profile, which is very difficult to see in traditional trials such as Isotope ratio mass spectrometry. Fake honey lacks the essential enzymes that give true honey and nutrition. To exacerbate things, Honey’s characteristics vary based on Nectar’s resources, harvesting times, geography and more.
Some companies Filter out Pollen content, a major identity of the geography source of a honey, before exporting it to intermediary countries such as Vietnam or India to further obfuscate the process. When this is done, the products are brought to the supermarket shelves and labeled with the wrong certification to order higher prices. This tactic exploits the fact that many regulatory bodies are lacking in the way to prove each shipment.
The hidden cost of food fraud
The supply chain was deeply broken, as a jar of honey passed six to eight main points in the supply chain before it arrived on the shelves in the UK. Current skills make validation of authenticity difficult. Including a bad paper -based bureaucracy that makes it difficult to monitor the obscuration attempts of origin in intermediary countries, we cannot expect to determine the true extent of food fraud.
One Food and Drug Administration (FDA) The estimate suggests that at least 1% of the global food industry, which potentially up to $ 40 billion per year, is affected – and it is higher.
Recently -But: wThe hat is decentralized the blockchain identity?
Deceptive skills are not only harmful to consumers – they destroy the livelihoods of beekeepers, flooding the market and destroying the profitability for legitimate entrepreneurs. Ziya Sahin, a Turkish Beekeeper, Explained The failure of the regulation of food fraud:
“Our beekeepers were angry, and they asked why we were not doing something to prevent it. But we had no authority to investigate,” he said. “Nor am I allowed to ask street sellers if their honey is true.”
While there is growing Gana For more reliable trials and tighter implementation, solutions were caught. EU’s latest attempt to fix it? Digital product passports are designed to track honey’s origins and compositions, but they are noted as ineffective and easy to manipulate, eventually leaving the open door for fraud.
EU passports are an ineffective solution
The European Union’s digital product passport aims to deal with it by enhancing traceability and transparency in its supply chains. By 2030, all goods in the EU must have a digital product Passport Contains detailed information on the product lifecycle, origin and environmental effects.
While the idea promises to promise, it fails to identify where scams can produce certificates and non -obscure origin by passing products through mediating countries along with officials who have become blind eyes.
At the core of this issue is trust. Despite history showing that these policies can be and bent, we rely on governments to enforce laws and regulations. Technology, on the other hand, is agnostic and does not care about money or incentives.
This is the main flaw of the EU’s approach – a system built on human supervision that is vulnerable to this corruption is already known.
Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) for products
Many people are aware of the trilemma scalability, but the Trust Triangle is a key concept in SSI that determines how confidence is established between those who give, holder and verifier. This makes fraud more difficult because each product must be supported by a proven credentials from a reliable source to prove that this is true.
Those who provide, such as manufacturers or bodies of certification, create and sign the proven credentials that confirm the authenticity of a product. The owner, usually the product owns, stores and presents these credentials as needed. Verifiers – such as retailers, customs officers or consumers – can check the validity of the credentials without relying on a central authority.
The proven credentials are protected by cryptography. If someone tries to sell fake products, their missing or invalid credentials will immediately reveal fraud.
Government reforms should expand more than current regulation administration and explore the approach outlined in the Trile’s Trilemma to protect the supply chains from widespread collapse and fraud.
SSI Provides the underlying infrastructure it is necessary to reliably monitor the identity of products in many bodies, standards and regions. By enabling a tamper-proof, end-to-end traceability in every single product-whether a honey jar or a designer handbag-SSI ensures that it is sufficient to confirm the data correctly to deal with attempts at fraud and obfuscation.
SSI also provides consumers who independently verify products without relying on third-party databases. Consumers can scan the product to prove origin and history directly through the cryptographic certifications confirmed by validators to further reduce the risk of misinformation even as it reaches the shelves. It will also help reduce corruption and inability, as many checks are done on paper, which is easy to change and a slow process.
While honey fraud methods continue to expand, as well as damage to these products to consumers and local businesses. The steps taken to deal with these procedures should also be expanded. EU digital product passports aim to improve monitoring; But unfortunately, they fall into the sophistication of scams. Implementing SSI is a necessary step to effectively addressing the extent of scams to be taken to ensure that their product comes to the shelves.
Opinion by: Fraser Edwards, Co-Founder and CEO, Cheqd.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be done as legal or investment advice. The views, attitudes, and opinions expressed here are unique and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of the cointelegraph.
