Tesis:
Development Traceability Systems for Agricultural products in India
- Autor: DANDAGE, Keshav Prakash
- Título: Development Traceability Systems for Agricultural products in India
- Fecha: 2018
- Materia: Sin materia definida
- Escuela: E.T.S. DE INGENIEROS AGRONOMOS
- Departamentos: INGENIERIA AGROFORESTAL
- Acceso electrónico: http://oa.upm.es/53747/
- Director/a 1º: RUIZ GARCÍA, Luis
- Resumen: Food safety has become a major concern in India, after the adulterated milk scam, usage of toxic chemicals in food and change the essential ingredient with something lesser value were found on large extent in recent years. Thus, there is a need of proper traceability systems in the Indian food industry, for reducing the cases of food safety incidents and fraudulence. With purpose in mind, in the beginning of this PhD thesis, there is a review of the existing traceability techniques in India which include RFID, Holograms, Barcode and other tracking media to monitor production processes. There are some Indian initiatives of food traceability system from APEDA in association with GS, that have created Anarnet, Peanut.net, Meat.net and Grapenet that control traceability for certain products. Also, there are some experiences with barcoding and several ICTs initiatives that are actively working in many states of India, that try to control the food safety and protect the consumers. However, several problems are extensively affecting the Indian food sectors that unbalanced their routine activities. The current traceability systems are behaving abnormally due to number of factors like the high level of illiteracy and lack of proper infrastructures. These situations block the implementation and adoption of ICT initiatives in rural India. In this framework, the objectives of the thesis are: 1) To evaluate current food traceability systems in India and assess the level of ICT adoption in rural India; 2) To analyze the shortcomings of ICT initiatives amongst the smallholders’ farmers in India 3) To support local food systems in India and direct sourcing of raw material from farmers to customer, retailer, food business operator, and exporter in India. 4) To increase the net income of smallholder farmers by providing market facility at the farm gate through web-based traceability portal in India. For achieving these objectives, two experimental studies were done. The first one (section 5.1), was focused in the adoption of ICT tools for tracking and tracing banana batches, in a case study in Jalgaon district (India). To test the hypothesis a field survey was conducted, where 115 respondents were interviewed including smallholder banana farmers and traders. The responses obtained through field survey were analyzed to get information related to knowledge of ICT tools, comfortable in using of local language for ICT, awareness and need for ICT in banana farming production. Hence it has been concluded that majority of traders don’t have effective traceability system and farmers are completely unresponsive about ICT tools. The second experimental study (in section 5.2) is dedicated to provide Indian farmers a new type of online web-based traceability portal, which would be useful for food operators, logistic providers and consumers. This portal as explained in the chapter, would save time and cost in building up traceability system for Indian food sector, wherein tracking and tracing information of food products using webserver and web API technology can be easily obtained. Thus, with the help of this portal, the country’s smallholder farmer will raise their annual income, and it improves the processes of fresh food products supply chain in India. The chapter titled as “Final Conclusions” provides a summary of what has been covered in this thesis and highlights the findings. Being the most important, that direct selling of farm produce is the best way to increase the income for the farmers which has found in survey area in Jalgaon district. And the web based traceability portal provides farmer with access to business opportunities at farm gate without linkage of any brokers in India. Finally, some suggestions for future research are presented. For keeping improving food traceability systems in India; guidance should be provided for small-scale food producers on internal control and development of effective risk management. Also, efforts need to be made to increase awareness on the ways to use and access product traceability information with the help of digital technology; and finally, focus should be made on the installation and development of the public web server and web APIs for an effective traceability control.