Agri giants look to blockchain and AI to transform global trade operations

Four well-known names from the agricultural industry – Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC) – are seeking to use blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) to digitize global agricultural shipping transactions.

The objective is to reduce resource- and time-intensive processes associated with the global agricultural commodity value chain.

The initial focus will on automating grain and oilseed post-trade execution processes, which represent a highly manual and costly part of the supply chain, according to the official release. In the long-term, the companies will seek to replace other manual, paper-based processes tied to contracts, invoices and payments, with a more modern and digital approach.

By leveraging blockchain, AI and other cutting-edge technology, the companies would work towards eliminating inefficiencies which would lead to shorter document-processing times, reduced wait times, and enhance reliability, efficiency and transparency with better end-to-end contracting visibility.

The companies said that they are also seeking broad-based industry participation to promote global access and adoption.

“We expect an industry-wide initiative of this nature to be able to accelerate improvements in data management and business processes, and bring much-needed automation to the industry,” Soren Schroder, Bunge’s CEO, said. “Promising technologies will not only provide synergies and efficiencies for ourselves, we believe they will prove vitally important to serving customers better by laying the foundation to enable greater transparency.”

Some of the participating companies have already trialed blockchain technology. LDC completed the first blockchain-based agricultural commodity transaction in January.

In May, Cargill teamed up with HSBC and ING to trial R3’s Corda blockchain platform to finance a shipment of soya from Argentina to Malaysia.