Goods traceability plays an increasingly important role for businesses and consumers. However, this work is facing many difficulties, requiring support solutions.
Traceability at the heart of agricultural digital transformation
Traceability is one of the eight key issues in the digital transformation of the sector. For digitization in agricultural product traceability to be highly effective, it is necessary to participate and coordinate with all parties, from State management to businesses, cooperatives and farmers.
According to Nguyen Quoc Toan, Director of the Centre for Digital Transformation and Agricultural Statistics under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Vietnam currently has around 19,000 cooperatives, 14,200 enterprises and 7,500 processing facilities in the agricultural sector, along with about 9,400 supermarkets and markets, which constitute the Big Data part of the sector. Therefore, traceability of agricultural products must be holistic and specific, he stressed.
Huynh Tan Dat, Deputy Director of the Plant Protection Department, said that the department has built a national database on planting area codes and export packing facilities.
Sharing about the Traceability System of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Nguyen Hoai Nam, a representative of the Center for digital transformation and agricultural statistics, said that the system is currently connecting and sharing data with 8 traceability systems of 8 provinces and cities and more than 3,964 enterprises with traceability codes of 16,987 agricultural and food products.
Standardising the product traceability system
For the traceability system at the Ministry to work effectively, Nam said, it is necessary to have the connection and guidance of the National Traceability Portal. Therefore, the traceability of agricultural products in particular and other products in general should be built and developed in the direction of connection, interconnection and concentration.
It can be seen that, in the digitization phase, traceability of agricultural products and food is bringing practical benefits to agricultural development, leading the way for building the brand name of Vietnamese agricultural products and food. It is necessary for the active participation of state management, businesses, cooperatives and farmers to realise the goal of transparent , responsible and sustainable agriculture.
Nguyen Hoang Linh, Deputy Director General of the Deputy Director General (Ministry of Science and Technology) shared: The traceability of goods is not a new activity for businesses. Many enterprises have methodically applied national and international standards to the product production process. The traceability helps control quality, safety and is also a tool for businesses to trace and recall defective products that have been supplied to the market.
For consumers, when buying and using products, there is a need to find out information about the origin of such products to prevent the use of counterfeit, imitation or low quality goods.
Previously, with stamps and stickers on products, information was very limited, incomplete or inaccurate. Nowadays, technological solutions for traceability have been widely developed so that consumers can easily trace the origin of products through their smartphones. Accordingly, products on the market are now controlled by transparent quality; and consumers can have confidence in the products of the enterprise.
The first difficulty today is that not all businesses apply technology solutions for traceability, ensuring information transparency for consumers. In addition, there are many solutions for traceability, but are those solutions true to the nature of traceability, do they really provide accurate information of businesses and products to consumers? If not, businesses still can't control this.
Therefore, Vietnam must have a way to standardise technically the traceability of goods and uniformly deploy this across the country.
In addition, the country needs to learn the requirements of foreign traceability to support businesses in the process of exporting goods.
Source: NDO
Keywords: product traceability solution
