The World Wide Fund for Nature, commonly known as Word Wildlife Fund (WWF), is spearheading a project to eliminate illegal fishing in the Pacific Islands, which will also help eliminate slave labor in the industry. Tuna industry is the main target area for the blockchain-based project, in which the WWF offices in Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji are working with the following companies:
- Brooklyn, New York, USA-based blockchain technology company ConsenSys;
- Suva, Fiji-based information and communications technology (ICT) company TraSeable;
- Suva, Fiji-based fishing and processing company Sea Quest.
Global fishing industry has long been plagued with illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. Over-exploitation of the stocks, fishing without the requisite permit, misreporting the volume and scale of fishing, employing slave labor, inhuman working conditions are widespread issues. Coastal nation-states, many of which are developing countries, depend heavily on income generated from fishing, and unsustainable practices are driving them towards a crisis with serious long-term repercussions. The Pacific Islands nations face these problem too, and Tuna fishing is a significantly impacted by these malpractices. Transparency is needed regarding how the fish was caught, how it was transported and processed, whether the operations were in contravention of the laws, whether the stock is overexploited. Consumers, with increasing awareness in this age of democratization of information, can then put serious pressure on businesses and governments, to put an end to illegal and unsustainable practices. There were past efforts to record information regarding all of the above aspects, using paper or web-based systems. However, the information collected wasn’t tamper-proof, and records were very hard to verify. There were far too many dependencies on middlemen operating at several levels, and achieving the desired transparency has been very hard, due to this.
A technology to eliminate the middlemen and to ensure immutable information is key to the solution, and this is where blockchain becomes important. Blockchain is a technology where a network of computers maintain a shared, verifiable, and permanent record of data. In this distributed database each node is considered as a ledger, and the entire database is maintained by all nodes. Each node is a point of authority, and this absence of one central point of authority, through which all updates must be routed, eliminates middlemen. Changing or deleting an existing block is not possible, hence, to update a blockchain, a new block has to be created. To create a new block, each “Miner”, i.e. the combination of powerful software, specially designed hardware, and their user, has to provide proof of work (POW) for the last recorded block in the blockchain, using a massive number-crunching operation done at high speed. This is in an environment where many other miners are also doing the same, which makes it more difficult for any miner to provide POW. This makes updating blockchain very hard, i.e. only when a miner provides proof of very significant number-crunching work done, he/she gets to create a new block. Hacking blockchain is, hence, not economically viable.
The system that WWF and the partner companies are working on, has the following features:
- The fish caught is assigned an RFID tag, and is entered in the blockchain as a unique record.
- Every step henceforth will be recorded in blockchain, such as transport, processing, and distribution.
- Once the Tuna is on the shelf of a store, a consumer can scan the tag in the package with her smartphone, and the blockchain-based system will make reveal information about how the fish was caught, how was it transported and processed, etc.
Singapore-based VeChain has implemented similar system to using their commercial blockchain platform, as reported earlier. The system provides ability to the consumers to scan tags attached to wine bottles using their smartphone, and blockchain lets them know whether the wine was produced responsibly and raw materials were procured ethically.
WWF is the largest conservation organization in the world, it’s a non-governmental organization (NGO). Founded by E.G. Galano and Joseph Lubin, ConsenSys brings significant blockchain development experience into the project. The other technology partner, TraSeable, founded by Kenneth Katafono, is widely experienced with the market in Fiji. Sea Quest, the fishing company led by Brett William Haywood has vast operational experience in the Tuna industry in the region, and Brett, like the other partners, is bullish about the project and the blockchain technology. The project team is working on finding a fish merchant to complete the testing of the system in the real market conditions.
