Proposal for a blockchain based agricultural input voucher system

Most of the small-scale farmers in Tanzania can’t afford to buy quality agricultural inputs (fertilizers and seeds), therefore the Tanzanian government issues paper-based subsidy vouchers to farmers for buying the inputs at half price. However, challenges like misuse of the vouchers by some governme...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Artificial life and robotics 2022, Vol.27 (3), p.461-471
Main Authors: Tende, Isakwisa Gaddy, Aburada, Kentaro, Yamaba, Hisaaki, Katayama, Tetsuro, Okazaki, Naonobu
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agrochemicals
Artificial Intelligence
Blockchain
Computation by Abstract Devices
Computer Science
Control
Cryptography
Digital signatures
Mechatronics
Original Article
Robotics
Seeds
Short message service
Subsidies
Vouchers
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Summary:Most of the small-scale farmers in Tanzania can’t afford to buy quality agricultural inputs (fertilizers and seeds), therefore the Tanzanian government issues paper-based subsidy vouchers to farmers for buying the inputs at half price. However, challenges like misuse of the vouchers by some government officials (stealing and favoritism in allocation) and lack of trust (difficulty of verifying vouchers’ authenticity) have resulted into low crop productivity for the farmers and loss of government funds. To address this, we have developed agricultural input voucher system which stores and allocates digital subsidy vouchers to farmers in the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network whose features like hashing and digital signature prevent misuse and ensure trust of the vouchers. Farmers access the digital vouchers through Short Message Service (SMS) in their mobile phones. Evaluation reveals that, the developed system is effective and meets performance demands of Tanzanian farmers. Also, Raft has better performance than Kafka consensus protocol.
ISSN:1433-5298
1614-7456
DOI:10.1007/s10015-021-00724-9