While most of the world news focuses on Brexit, or the discussion attempts between the USA and North Korea, there is a growing threat in Eastern Asia, which affects the lives of hundreds of millions: the spread of the African Swine Fever (ASF) disease.
News started to appear during the summer of 2018 from China. For some months, it was contained within the country, but since the beginning of 2019, it started to spread to neighboring countries. Until that time, outbreaks were confirmed in 28 Chinese provinces/regions, and 950,000 pigs have been culled in an effort to stop further spread.
As the death rate of the infected pigs from the ASF virus is almost 100%, the food supply of hundreds of millions is in serious danger, besides the livelihood of millions in the food industry.
What is the problem we want to solve?
Connection between food safety authorities and food supply chain companies is often completely missing in the emerging and developing countries. The lack of quick and efficient communication makes a lot of governmental tasks more difficult:
- They don’t have an overview of the actual supply/demand of fresh food in a region or a country.
- They have no potential to see early warning signs of a potential epidemic.
- They don’t have the channels to reach out to farmers and educate them about the necessary steps to prevent the disease to spread.
- They can’t respond quickly and efficiently in case of an epidemic outbreak without knowing real time status.
- They can’t assess and forecast the potential damage caused by an epidemic.
- They don’t have the possibility to plan and manage subsidies according to real data. Subsidizations are important in such cases to avoid mass bankruptcies in the food industry.
What solution can technology offer?
The solution is a pragmatic, results-oriented system to establish efficient direct communication between food safety authorities and supply chain companies (primarily farms and processing facilities) for data collection, assessment and response, using modern technologies like mobile and blockchain, which can be implemented quickly.
Certainly technology itself can not prevent these diseases, but it can provide authorities a tool to control and minimize the damage.
TE-FOOD has the solution
TE-FOOD’s Livestock Management System with its Epidemic Control Module is the perfect tool
- to establish direct communication amongst authorities and the stakeholders of the food supply chain,
- to provide governments real time inshight of the livestock status, and involve professionals to assess evidence (e.g. symptoms, photos) flowing in from farms,
- to disseminate practical education materials amongst farmers about epidemic prevention, contamination identification, and guidance on emergency treatment activities,
- to enable governments to respond quickly in case of an epidemic outbreak. Using the collected information, they can establish epidemic zones, set up checkpoints for movement control, order culling activities, etc.,
- to manage complementary reporting activities to prevent the spread (e.g. truck cleaning, feeding sources)
- and to mitigate the damage done by the disease. Using the reports, governments can plan and communicate subsidies according to the confirmed case volume.
The blockchain based system doesn’t require any hardware related investment from stakeholders, companies can use TE-FOOD’s mobile app to send several types of reports, state veterinaries can also use the mobile app to investigate the reports, and authorities access the real time results to see the trends in a web based application. Raw report data will be stored on the FoodChain.
Introducing the first initiative of the TE-FOOD Charity Program
There are hard times, when we have to put away the fight for profit, and focus on what we can do to help countries with challenging situations. Companies like TE-FOOD — which provides solutions to solve social problems — aims to be proactive to implement use cases where blockchain technology can help people’s lives.
This is why TE-FOOD decided to offer its Livestock Management System with the Epidemic Control Module free of charge in countries which are affected by the African Swine Fever outbreaks.
This will enable national, provincial, and municipal governments to fight off this disease successfully, and minimize the negative effects. We belive that blockchain based technology can make the food industry stronger, and we are open to help stakeholders to ease their efforts.
Can you help in these efforts? Get in contact with us: info@te-food.com
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TE-FOOD is the world’s largest publicly accessible, farm-to-table food traceability solution. Started in 2016, it serves 6000+ business customers, and handles 400,000 business transactions each day.
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