AgTech Solutions to Minimize Deforestation and Fraud

There are many challenges that deforestation presents to the world today. Not only is it one of the leading contributors to climate change, but it also removes precious forested areas that endangered wildlife relies on for food and shelter.

While many countries have made attempts to tackle the issue of deforestation, several major issues remain. To finally address deforestation, global governments are changing laws and regulations — especially as they apply to agricultural trade.

In response to these regulations, farms and agricultural companies now have to adjust how they operate. While deforestation laws relieve the earth of excess climate harm, restrictions pose new challenges to the supply chain.

Namely, fraud is now a growing problem in the food trade. But fortunately, there are technological solutions that relieve farmers of the many risks posed to their livelihoods and ensure ethical steps toward minimizing deforested farming.

Deforestation Compliance Challenges and the Rise of Fraud

As laid out by the European Union, the design of the new deforestation laws is to protect the world’s natural forests from excessive removal. In agriculture, forested land is often cleared to make room for crop fields or to support cattle grazing.

Up until recently, deforestation regulations weren’t official laws. They were merely guidelines. Now that real laws and standards are in place, there are agricultural actors that try to refuse or even circumvent these important standards.

In fact, there have been instances in which fraudulent practices are already taking place. Fraudulent activity happens in several ways in the food supply chain:

• Land clearance. Some farmers illegally deforest areas of land that are under protection, resulting in misrepresentation of operation, crop production, and documentation.
• False certification. To act in compliance with deforestation laws, some farmers and traders fake certifications to continue supply chain operations.
• Fraudulent geo-reports. In cases of geo-tracking, some farmers might claim crop growth on an area of land where no deforestation takes place when in reality, their crops are growing in areas of large deforestation. There have been many cases of neighboring farms reporting the same location to avoid penalties for growing on deforested land.

Conversely, not all farmers currently operating on deforested land are intentionally fraudulent. In many cases — especially in rural areas around the world — smallholder farmers purchase where deforestation has already occurred, sometimes without their knowledge. With the advancement of satellite imaging for deforestation, proving that these land masses are sites of deforestation is easy.

In accordance with new deforestation bans, such farmers are in a position where they may no longer be able to sell their crops in the supply chain. In a sense, there is now a limit on their opportunities. They can either find a new farm location (which is expensive and unrealistic for many) or take a hit to their business.

Fraud and Its Impacts on the Global Supply Chain

Fraud negatively affects nearly every industry in today’s global market. How can agricultural suppliers and traders resist and manage fraud?

Digital tools such as satellites, drones, geolocation signals, and mobile apps can help calculate risk in the agricultural industry. They also provide farmers with the tools they need to operate in compliance with deforestation laws.

Customers, municipalities, regulatory boards, and banks can use tech-supported agriculture data to evaluate whether or not a specific farm is abiding by deforestation laws. Now more than ever, this is crucial to the supply chain. There are too many examples to count when it comes to the impacts of fraud and deforestation.

In Brazil, there have been cases of cattle farmers using vast deforested lands for cattle grazing. However, they then transfer their cattle to a location that has had no deforestation before selling them, creating false evidence that the cattle and byproducts thereafter had no involvement in deforestation.

With agricultural technology solutions like Dimitra, lifestyle farm records ensure the preservation of geolocation tags. Date stamps also verify farm activity, from grazing to maintenance to sale within the supply chain. For smallholder farms and large-scale operations, this technology is a crucial step toward ensuring the integrity of farm operations.

Dimitra Technology: Deforestation Compliance for Farmers and Suppliers

Leading AgTech solutions from Dimitra help farmers, producers, and other players in the supply chain keep track of deforestation compliance certificates and actively fight fraud. With the Dimitra Deforestation Compliance module, accurate evaluations of crop growth, yield, and supply are now possible.

The Dimitra platform evaluates the land being claimed and estimates how much of a crop can be grown on the property, comparing accuracy with production reports. This holds farmers accountable. The Deforestation Compliance module can also indicate:

• Whether or not a crop was grown on reported farmland
• If the amount of produce being shipped was grown on the farm
• How often farmers and workers were physically present on reported farmland, using mobile GPS and geolocation data
• Accuracy of satellite data, combined with AgTech integrations for comprehensive Web3 reports ensuring deforestation compliance
• Record any supply chain activity to the blockchain, ensuring it is immutable

Geolocation records can track crop trade and transactions to show when a farmer was physically on their reported farmland. It can sync with data to verify actions they took through other Dimitra modules such as Connected Farmer.

Typically, a farmer actively works on their farm nearly every day during the season. But farmers using a “faux farm” location to circumvent deforestation standards will only be on the farm location several days per year. With geolocation records, these fraudulent situations can be spotted early, preventing fraudulent players from selling to manufacturers.

With satellite and machine learning, the Dimitra Deforestation Compliance module generates certificates of compliance to allow ethical and legal supply trade. These certificates are written to the blockchain, ensuring immutable timestamps that prevent counterfeit and fraudulent reports.

This technology is revolutionary. In the past, when several countries tried to implement similar deforestation restrictions, some farmers continued to operate on deforested land — and in some cases, even increased the removal of forests.

Now, there’s little room to pretend. With Dimitra technology, blockchain records play a crucial role in validating deforestation compliance, ultimately minimizing fraud opportunities throughout the food supply chain.

To learn more about Dimitra solutions to resist fraud in global agriculture, visit www.dimitra.io/deforestation.