If we use Blockchain for Farming
I am a Ghanaian and I had to think about a problem affecting the farmers, those mostly living in the rural villages in both my country and around the world. Most farmers work very hard to earn a living wage and a lot of them are still unable to increase their income.
I wanted to sort of brainstorm with this post, and find out with the Steemit community, how blockchain can solve these problems for some of them, assuming that there are some things that normal computers or centralised systems cannot do.
There’s your typical cocoa farmer in the Western Region of Ghana. He’s hoping to sell his produce to a chocolate shop in Switzerland, probably the biggest dream of the average cocoa farmer. Both of them, (the cocoa farmer and the Swiss shop) are from different parts of the world and have never met before. The farmer from the village would typically rely on a database created by a computer in the village to record his sales but the chocolate shop would not trust such a database to safely pay the farmer his due. The involvement of big global banks as you already know, would incur too much in bank fees for the farmer.
Assuming we had a stable Steem dollar backed token for these payments, our farmers will get to earn their fair share of the global market without incurring the huge fees of big banks.
Land disputes are a major problem in Ghana today. For a while, people would bribe council workers so that they could have names of previous land owners altered in the computerized database to be able to steal a farm.
A simple database that is managed by a boss, is always going to have a chance of people manipulating records to serve their own purposes. But assume we just put farm land titles on a public blockchain. It does not have to be public it can be known to all parties involved including the hopefully unbiased government.
That basically means there is a permanent record of who owns what and this record cannot be altered in the past by anyone, not even the President of Ghana or a village Chief. So it'll provide the farmer and his family with safeguarding against such disputes for generations to come.
Interest rates charged by banks in Ghana for loans to farmers to purchase tractors are extremely high. With the way agriculture is unpredictable, a little mistake could lead to immediate bankruptcy.
The blockchain can assist farmers to raise funds to purchase tractors without the need of local banks. This could be by the farmer selling off small crypto tokens of his future harvest of maize for instance, which can even be bought online by people in London or Tokyo, and the farmer would then receive his return on his investment in his harvest automatically through the blockchain.
Payments and transactions become very open.
The only problem I had to ponder over was the security of our money. Since securing the keys or passwords is solely our responsibility, if some hacker is smart enough, they could take advantage of it.
So while we're thinking about the benefits, we should consider the risk factor and see the solution to it, but all in all I believe it's worth the shot.