DIASCA: Towards digital public infrastructure (DPI)
The German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (LkSG), the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) place new demands on companies. In future they will need to prove that they are meeting legal due diligence requirements. This creates an urgent need to trace and securely document the origins and sustainable production of agricultural products.
While the number of traceability solutions on the market is steadily rising, data incompatibilities unfortunately often mean that the various systems are unable to exchange data. Digital solutions are barely interoperable. As a result, both producer organisations and downstream actors in the supply chain have to collect, store and convert data repeatedly – requiring greater effort and making the process more susceptible to errors.
Digital standards for product traceability along supply chains could significantly improve efficiency and facilitate information exchange within supply chains. Such standards would serve as a basis for data exchange and reliable documentation of corporate due diligence obligations. Interoperability of traceability systems from producer to consumer would therefore benefit all actors along the supply chain, providing a way to tackle issues such as transparency, avoiding deforestation or ensuring living incomes for farmers.
From coexistence to collaboration
One goal of DIASCA is to develop common open standards to support interoperability between traceability systems. From a due diligence content perspective, DIASCA focuses on regulatory requirements regarding deforestation and living incomes and wages. In view of the EU legislative proposal, DIASCA is working to develop solutions and validate them through real-world reference projects. It is intended to establish common best practice recommendations for overcoming the current challenges of data exchange between traceability applications by defining and applying global, open and cross-sectoral standards.
DIASCA aims at facilitating and supporting:
- Compatibility between different systems, leading to far more efficient data exchange along agricultural supply chains;
- Greater efficiency of data collection at origin by making data comparable and (re-)useable for a variety of purposes;
- Freedom of choice and improved access to digital solutions for all supply chain actors;
- Participation of smallholder organisations in the benefits of due diligence legislation;
- Higher incomes for smallholders due to greater transparency in agricultural supply chains.
DIASCA: Working together towards an interoperable ecosystem of digital solutions in agriculture to benefit producers.
From data standards to digital public infrastructure (DPI) for EUDR compliance
The EU regulation on deforestation-free products will come into force on 30 December 2024, and requires the digital capture of specific data to ensure compliance with this regulation:
- Geolocation of fields: It is required to collect geodata of agricultural land, either in the form of polygon coordinates for fields or at least as geopoints for areas under 4 hectares.
- Forest monitoring: reliable methods are needed, based on satellite imagery, to accurately assess whether or not deforestation has occurred within a given time period.
- Traceability: information and data on the origin of the product must be passed on via traceability solutions along the entire supply chain up to import into the EU market.
So far, there is a lack of proven and cost-effective solutions that can meet all three of these requirements. For this reason, a consortium consisting of DIASCA/GIZ, Linux Foundation/AgStack, COSA, and CGIAR is actively working on the development of a prototype for an integrated, open-source digital public infrastructure (DPI) that will be used to meet the EUDR directives. This DPI is based on several existing digital infrastructures and software components. The open-source applications are primarily intended to support smallholders and producer organizations in effectively implementing the requirements of the EUDR.
