EBSI projects
TRACE4EU Seafood Tracing
Helping the EU Fishing Industry to enhance product traceability, food safety, and combat illegal fishing.
The vision
Towards global traceability of Norwegian seafood products and addressing issues of transparency along the supply chain.
Together, the TRACE4EU Consortium is working with the Directorate of Fisheries, Fishers, Norges Råfisklag, Food Safety Authorities, Equipment Compliance Authorities, Customs, and Taxation Authorities to address the issues of insufficient data, lack of standardization, tracing the origin of king crabs, and detecting illegal fishing. This collaboration ensures that the authority and end customer can have complete confidence in having high-quality, sustainably sourced crabs
The challenge
Illegal fishing, black-market transactions and inaccurate data in the Norwegian seafood industry.
It has been reported that approximately 20% of fish caught globally fall under the Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) category, with total costs ranging from $10 billion to $23 billion every year. Illegal fishing has also been highlighted by the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) in their 2022 annual report as a major societal problem undermining sustainable resource management.
Norway has launched the Automatic Identification System (AIS) to maintain a continuous overview of fishery vehicle traffic along the Norwegian coast and at sea. Although it can track vessels at large, it is still difficult to track individual products and ensure complete traceability for the authority and end customer.
The opportunity
Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize supply chain management and ensure traceability.
Blockchain technology allows for the tracing of each product and enhances supply chain transparency, presenting a unique opportunity to revolutionize the traceability of seafood, combat the threat of illegal fishing, and ensure food safety. With this opportunity in mind, the project focuses on creating a blockchain-based infrastructure through the use of three main technologies:
- Verifiable Credentials (VCs): to register, present, and formalize claims held by actors on the platform.
- QR Codes: To identify each individual king crab.
- Blockchain Ledger: Using the time-stamping API to create an audit trail and provenance of products.
The project
Building the foundation of traceable seafood supply-chain infrastructure.
The Europen Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) allows the Seafood Tracing project to design, build, and operate the next generation of seafood supply-chain services for the benefit of EU economies. The Seafood Tracing project aligns with the EU's digital policy and circular economy goals, aiming to develop traceability system capabilities by 2028 using the Digital Product Passport (DPP). Within this context, EBSI is used as the trust model to issue and verify verifiable credentials, issue QR codes to each individual product, and register on the ledger supply chain events.
EBSI allows this project to operate the next generation of decentralized tracing services with the objective of building an infrastructure designed to:
- Allow authorities to verify the catch certificate of seafood in the market.
- Allow the exchange of information between fisheries, law enforcement authorities, and other stakeholders.
- A peer-to-peer API model with blockchain time-stamping and notarization service, creating an audit trail detailing the history and provenance of shipments, storage, and trading.
The scenario
Discover the scenarios.
Registration and Identification of King Crabs.
Registration and Identification of King Crabs
- The Directorate of Fisheries they 1 issues the fisher an identification credential. When a registered fisher catches a king crab, they register their catch details in an internal journal. Such details can include the total weight of the crabs, vessel id, and catch area.
- When the fishing ship reaches the port, Alice, an employee at Norges Råfisklag, an intermediary between the buyers and sellers of king crabs, receives the batch and the king crabs journal. Alice 2 verifies the identity of the fisher against the EBSI ledger. Alice can then inspect the king crabs physically to verify the details registered in the journal credential.
- If satisfied, Alice 3 issues a Product & Sales Order verifiable credential and places a linked QR code for each crab or shipment. She then uses the EBSI timestamping API to 4 timestamp the Product & Sales Order credential
Packaging of crabs
Bob works for a seafood transportation company in Norway
- Alice checks out the crabs from the storage tanks and hands them over to Bob. Bob 5 verifies the Product & Sales order credential against EBSI ledger and transports them to the airport terminal.
Mike works for Norges Råfisklag and is in charge of packing crabs at the airport terminal
- Mike 6 receives the crabs from Bob and 7 verifies the Product & Sales Order credential against the EBSI ledger. Mike then packs the crabs in labelled cartons/boxes. He 8 issues and 9 timestamps the package verifiable credential that references the Product & Sales credential.
Customs and Transportation
John is a Norwegian Customs officer in charge of seafood exports.
- John scans the barcode of the cartons and retrieves the Product & Sales Order. Once the credential is 10 verified against the EBSI ledger, he 11 issues a Customs Clearance verifiable credential.
Mark is an Airline Cargo operator in Norway.
- Mark receives the cartons of crabs which he can scan to 12 verify the authenticity of the Customs Clearance credential against the EBSI ledger. Mark can then 13 issue a Transport & Delivery verifiable credential linked to both the Product & Sales and Packaging credentials. The cargo operator then transports them to the store that made the purchase.
- Eva, the store owner who purchased the crabs wholesale, can 14 verify the Product & Sales, Package, and Customs Clearance credentials against the EBSI ledger
- Once sold to a customer, the customer is also able to retrieve, read, and 15 verify against the EBSI ledger the Sales Order credential and the history of the supply chain detailed within.
The project plan
Current implementation stage and plan.
Next steps
EBSI-Seafood Tracing Initiative: A Strategic Shift for Sustainable Supply Chain Management.
Achieving the cross-border seafood supply chain management framework demands a strategic and operational shift, mobilizing a vast ecosystem involving fishers, authorities, consumers, and EU economies at large. To do this, calls for interest to pilot in the live environment will remain open until the end of May 2024, after which the EBSI-Seafood Tracing project is planning to go live with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in April 2024. The creation of a digital infrastructure for tracing seafood necessitates common guidelines, including a new track and trace system and provenance knowledge system to combat the growing illicit fishing in the EU and beyond. Post-2025 will see continuous development and upgrade plans.
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