Opinion
The brutal honesty has its place, especially when facing discomfort, so here are those that cannot be sweetened with honey: 96 % of imported honey in the UK is fake! The tests found that 24 of 25 tractors were Suspicious Or did not meet organizational standards.
Self (SSI) can fix this.
UK Food Standards and UNHCR urges reform to address this anxiety by creating strong trace Database Inside the supply chain networks to ensure consumer transparency and confidence. Data, however, is not the problem. The issue is tampering with it.
This is not the first time that the products have been detected to be unreliable, with the Asala network Highlight A third of all honey products were fake in 2020, which is a fraudulent industry Steadfastness To 3.4 billion euros ($ 3.65 million) of fake goods entering the European Union in 2023, the European Commission said.
What is EMA, and how it affects honey?
EMA cheating (EMA) Involve Purifying valuable ingredients for less expensive products such as localities or low -quality oil. This practice leads to severe economic and health complications – and in some cases, the disease – due to the toxic additions of alternative products.
Fraud often involves creating a super -high mix that contains minimal nutritional value, and it is called fake … honey.
Fraudulent Reduce the product with high fructose corn syrup or increase its thickness with starch or gelatin. These ribs mimic closely the chemical appearance of honey, which makes it very difficult to discover traditional tests such as Liny spectrum measurement of the proportion of isotopes. Fake honey lacks the basic enzymes that give real honey their flavors and nutrients. Mattering is more than the haney characteristics, based on the sources of nectar, harvesting, geography, and more.
Some companies filtering The content of the pollen, which is a major identifier for the origin of geography of honey, before exporting it to intermediate states such as Vietnam or India to increase the strengthening of this process. Once you are completed, the products are brought to the supermarkets and described them with false certificates to get higher prices. This tactic takes advantage of the fact that many organizational bodies lack the means to verify each shipment.
The hidden cost of defrauding food
The supply chain is deeply broken, with a jar of honey from six to eight main points in the supply chain before arriving on the shelves in the UK. Current practices make the verification of originality very difficult. Besides the ineffective paper -based bureaucracy that makes it difficult to follow mystery attempts in intermediate countries, we cannot determine the true range of reliably food fraud.
one Food and Drug Administration (FDA) The estimate indicates that at least 1 % of the global food industry, which amounts to $ 40 billion annually, is affected – and may be higher.
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Fraud practices are not only harmful to consumers – they destroy the livelihoods of beekeepers, flood the market and destroy the profitability of legal merchants. Zia Sahin, Turkish bee breeders, Make up Fraud from food fraud:
“Our educators are angry, and they ask why we are not doing anything to stop it. But we have no inspection salad,” he said. “I am not even allowed to ask street sellers if their honey is real.”
While there is growing appetite For more reliable and tougher tester, solutions are lagging behind. The last attempt by the European Union to reform this? Digital products passports are designed to track the assets and composition of honey, but they are already criticized as ineffective and easy to manipulate, leaving the door ultimately open for continued fraud.
European Union passports is an ineffective solution
The European Union’s digital product passport aims to address this matter by enhancing tracking and transparency in its supply chains. By 2030, all goods in the European Union must have a digital product passport It contains detailed information about the life cycle of product, assets and environmental effects.
Although the idea appears to be promising, it fails to realize the extent of fraud can formulate certificates and hide their origins by passing products across intermediate countries alongside officials who turn a party.
At the heart of this issue is confidence. Although history indicates that these rules can bend, we rely on governments to implement laws and regulations. Technology, on the other hand, do not know and do not care about money or incentives.
This is the primary disadvantage of the European Union’s approach – a system based on human control subject to corruption. These supply chains are already known.
Self Identity (SSI) for products
Many people are already aware of the expansion trio, but the trusteeship is a major concept in SSI that determines how to establish confidence between exporters, holders and performers. Fraud makes more challenging because each product must be supported by verified accreditation data from a reliable source to prove that it is real.
Exporters, such as manufacturers or certification bodies, create and sign verified accreditation data that attest to the health of the product. Pregnant, the product owner usually stores and displays these accreditation data when necessary. Pencils – such as retailers, customs officials, or consumers can verify the validity of accreditation data without relying on the central authority.
The verified accreditation data is protected by encryption. If someone tries to sell fake products, missing or unconfirmed accreditation data will immediately reveal fraud.
Government reforms must extend beyond the current organizational supervision and explore the approach shown in TRUST Trilemma to protect supply chains from fraud and fraud on a large scale.
Ssi It provides the basic infrastructure needed to track the identity of products through multiple bodies, standards and regions. By enabling tampering-resistant tracking tracking, in each product-whether it is a jar of honey or a designed handbag-SSI believes that caffeine auditors assure that the data is correct to process fraud and attempts.
SSI also enables consumers to independently verify products without relying on third -party databases. Buyers can erase the product to authenticate its origin and history directly through encryption certificates that the auditors have confirmed to increase the risk of wrong information even if it reaches the shelves. This would also help reduce corruption and incompetence, as many checks are made on paper, which can be easily changed and is a slow process.
With the continued expansion of honey fraud methods, as well as the harm of these products to consumers and local companies. The steps taken to address these methods should be expanded. European Union digital products are aimed at improving tracking; Unfortunately, they lack the development of fraudsters. The implementation of SSI is a necessary step to treat the extent that the fraudsters take to ensure their products reach the shelves.
Opinion: Edwards Freezer, co -founder and CEO, Cheqd.
This article is intended for general information purposes and does not aim to be and should not be considered legal or investment advice. The opinions, ideas and opinions expressed here are alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
