Application of ICT in the food supply chain

Posted on

In te context of his secondment to UNLP, Dr. Akshit Singh from the University of Liverpool, conducted a teaching session.

Abstract: The use of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) have been predominantly found in manufacturing and service industries. However, in the last decade, the scope and scale of their application in food industries has significantly risen. Some of the most commonly deployed ICT in agri-food industries are: RFID, Cloud Computing Technology, IOT, Blockchain, etc. Given the nature of complex and global food supply chains, these ICT solutions virtually brings all the components of supply chains viz. farmers, processors, wholesalers, retailers and consumers on a single platform thereby enhancing transparency, traceability and efficiency in the flow of product, information and finance across the food supply chain (from farm to fork). Traditionally, the ICT being expensive in nature was only limited to the wealthy and innovative stakeholders in food chain (retailers, processors, logistics and other components in downstream of food chain). Nevertheless, lately the upstream of food chains (farmers, producers) have overlooked their traditional practices to adopt ICT to raise their produce due to multitude of factors- decline in price of ICT implementation, advent of mobile web applications, pressure from government, consumers and other stakeholders to reduce carbon footprint, address bullwhip effect etc. Therefore, farmers realised that they can no longer work in isolation and ICT played active role in integrating them with downstream of supply chain.

The presentation used is available for download as pdf

This entry was posted in teaching, updates.