The BBC reports that fish are the latest product to be tracked:
The government is to call for a Europe-wide system for tracking fish to help cut down on illegal fishing.
Fisheries Minister Ben Bradshaw and Overseas Development Minister Gareth Thomas say it will make it harder for illegal catches to enter the EU.
User interfaces for harried supermarket shoppers need to summarise information into small easily consumed packages that make sense quickly. But once you’ve got your chilled products home, perhaps you have time to find out more about their ethical and environmental impact? Hacked fridge to the rescue:
Did you small-talk, chat or SMS with your fridge today? Is the milk past its sell-by date? Am I out of butter? By now, we have written several lengthy and long-winded articles about it – this, the intelligent refrigerator; and now we’re at it again. Why? Simply because the fridge talking to its owners and to the foodstuffs in its care has now become a reality. And we made it ourselves – well, almost… The fridge has now become aware of its contents; and it is capable of establishing direct contact between you and their producers. Like you, the fridge is on the Internet and thus able to get hold of you – even on your mobile. It will let you know what you need to buy if you want to prepare a simmering beef stroganoff; also, it will alert you if you are out of chocolate-and-fruit flavoured ice cream. But this is as much about security! In case a food producer detects a potential health hazard in a shipment, he can – via the fridge – send out a warning and withdraw the product in question.
The Sunday Times magazine has a long feature on the rise and rise of ethical shopping:
Supermarkets know that there is a groundswell of opinion among consumers concerned about green and ethical issues. In a recent survey, the market researchers Mintel predicted that, this year, British shoppers would spend £2 billion on organic, fair trade and locally sourced products, an increase 62% since 2002. The same survey also found that the fair-trade market alone is predicted to be around £230m by the end of the year, doubling to£547m by 2011. Planting the flag to say “we care the most” could give retailers a big competitive advantage.
This week saw me talk to the New Scientist about the project. Find the first part of the story here (the rest needs a subscription to the magazine).
Then the Radio 4 programme on farming picked it up, so I popped into the BBC studios to talk about it yesterday. It went out on Farming News this morning at 5.45am. You can hear the interview on the Listen Again facility, linked from here, for the next few days.
Both reporters seemed more interested in the ethical shopping dimension of the project than any bridging the global digital divide aspects, although I described them in some detail. You can’t tell a journalist what to cover!
(pictures from BBC News)
BBC News reports:
A colour barcode system holding more data than current codes will find its way onto DVDs later this year.
…
Microsoft has said consumers could interact with the new barcodes, using webcams and mobile phones with cameras.
…
Information such as a website address or e-mail address could be stored inside the barcode and once scanned by a mobile phone, the consumer could be taken to a promotional page, a website offering downloads or extra content.
One of the most useful contacts we made while visiting India was with the Institut Français de Pondichéry. Dr Claude Garcia and colleagues are working on building a database on agronomic conditions in coffee plantations around the Western Ghats. We hope to work with Dr Garcia to see whether this type of information could be usefully included in a fair tracing system:
The Department of Ecology aims to understand and assess biological diversity in both natural and human-transformed ecosystems as a contribution to improved practices of sustainable management and conservation. These areas of research are closely associated with other global concerns such as water conservation, carbon sequestration and climatic changes. Special interest has long been devoted to fragile and useful mangroves and to biodiversity-rich forest ecosystems, on which considerable expertise and information have been gained over several decades of laboratory and fieldwork.
Thanks to Andy Dearden for letting us know about a recent radio programme on food traceability:
BBC – Radio 4 – The Food Programme
Sheila Dillon investigates the problem of food fraud and meets the scientists who are coming up with new methods of authenticating the food we buy.
Sheila talks to Trading Standards Officer, Lee Ormondy who embarked on a painstaking paper trail in order to discover the true origins of beef labelled as British.
Sheila meets Dr Mark Woolfe, head of Authenticity, at the Food Standards Agency at London’s Borough Market and hears from traders about the traceability of the food they sell.
Reporter Dan Isaacs talks to R. S. Seshadri, a director of the rice company Tilda in New Delhi, about how they use DNA techniques to ensure the purity of their basmati supply.
Michael Eade, Environmental Health Officer at Richmond Council in London talks about research he carried out into the extent of organic mis-selling by butchers, greengrocers and at farmers markets.
Paul Brerton from DEFRA’s Central Science Laboratory in York and Stuart Ackroyd, a York city catering butcher, talk about methods of checking the origins of meat by analysing its water content.
And Sheila is joined in the studio by Dr. Martin Caraher of City University’s Centre for Food Policy.
During our visit to Bangalore, we attended the India International Coffee Festival 2007 in order to learn more about Indian Coffee and to present the Fair Tracing Project to interested producers.
The festival began with a welcome address from Krishna Rau, the current Chairman of the Coffee Board of India followed by several other speakers including Shri Jairam Ramesh, the Minister of State for Commerce.
On the second day the Fair Tracing team was invited to present the project to the audience. As a part of the “Coffee Differentiation for Value Enhancement” session, Ian Brown and Ann Light presented the aims and goals of Fair Tracing and invited coffee producers to work with us on the project.
The session was followed by “Coffee Quality and Sustainability” with producers from Kenya, Costa Rica and India talking about the challenges and problems they encounter during their work. One speaker was Bose Mandanna, a coffee planter from Coorg, the largest coffee growing district in the country and former Vice Chairman of the Coffee Board who kindly invited the Fair Tracing team to visit his plantation the following week. Another was Dr Adolfo Lizano-Gonzalez, deputy executive director at the Instituto Del Cafe de Costa Rica. Mr Mandanna and Dr Lizano-Gonzalez described a range of information on the environmental impact of coffee farms that could be included in a product information system: the range of wildlife sheltered by plants, methods of rainfall management, whether processing water and pulp are reused and filtered, and the impact of farms as “carbon sinks” under the Kyoto treaty. With Dr Joseph Kimemia, director of research at Kenya’s Coffee Research Foundation, they also discussed social impact indicators such as the average level of worker income, education and housing provided to workers’ families, and the provision of micro credit to grower communities. Mr Mario Cerutti, director of Luigi Lavazza Spa, described his company’s ¡Tierra! project, which certifies minimum environmental and social standards for coffee suppliers.
The last day of the conference was about the image of coffee, including speakers such as Dr. Ernesto Illy the Honorary Chairman of Illycaffe, Italy and Dr. Sylvia Robert-Sargeant from Positively Coffee.
The Coffee Festival provided a great opportunity for the Fair Tracing team to learn more about Indian coffee and the challenges and problems the planters encounter. Furthermore, we were able to present the project and discuss it with people who are involved in producing and distributing Indian coffee — vital to our participative design process. We are working to build strong partnerships with a number of organisations we met during our visit.
The Reveal Labeling Initiative is designing product labels to convey environmental impact, including information such as manufacturing energy and recyclable/reusable post-consumer content.
Last month’s Doors 9: Food, energy and fuel conference was a great opportunity for several of the Fair Tracing team to meet like-minded designers and activists. You can read some after-event musings from organiser John Thackara.
Most relevant for us were the following projects:
