Empowering Small-Scale Agriculture through Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology: Review and Future Perspectives

Agriculture plays an essential role in modern society and still represents the main source of livelihood for most people in low-income and developing countries. According to data provided by the World Bank # (World Bank, n.d.), the 2022 rate of employment in agriculture in low-income and least developed countries was respectively 58.8% and 54.2% (global rate was 26.3%). The food demand of a growing global population is now putting strains on small farmers worldwide, and especially those from low- and middle-income countries, who struggle to access markets (Tripoli and Schmidhuber, 2020). The current global food market is indeed dominated by large-scale producers and is therefore complex and risky for small players, as it requires the participation of several intermediaries (Kamilaris et al., 2019; Kumarathunga et al., 2022). Access to markets is not the only challenge farmers are facing. The agri-food supply chain is also characterised by transparency and efficiency issues (Tripoli and Schmidhuber, 2020). If on the one hand, consumers demand transparent information about their food purchases (Rocha et al., 2021), then on the other hand, the number of actors involved in the supply chain negatively impacts information flow, limiting traceability and quality control (Kamilaris et al., 2019).