The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock of Brazil (MAPA) held the webinar "Study on the use of blockchain in the organic honey production chain", which presented the findings of the study prepared jointly by both institutions on the use of blockchain technology for trade facilitation and the traceability of organic honey exports. The event was organized within the framework of the United Nations Development Account project "Blockchains for facilitating trade and enhancing competitiveness", and included a presentation on the context of organic production in Brazil and on the Brazilian Organic Conformity Assessment System (SisOrg), which covers more than 26,000 registered producers.

The study shows that the proposed solution — a permissioned, private network complemented by mobile and web applications with offline operation — enables the secure and tamper-evident recording of every stage of the production chain, from the apiary and the extraction house to lot aggregation at the cooperative, laboratory analysis, organic certification, the issuance of the sanitary certificate for export, and consultation by the final consumer through QR codes. This creates an end-to-end infrastructure of trust, capable of reducing verification times and costs, improving risk management, and facilitating small-scale beekeepers' access to high-value markets with stringent transparency and certification requirements.

The legal analysis presented during the session concludes that Brazil has an enabling regulatory framework and that no new legislation is required to launch the project with legal certainty, as existing law recognizes the evidentiary validity of digital records and safeguards data protection and data sovereignty. Participants also examined the potential to extend this model to other agrifood chains and to phytosanitary certification, as well as the importance of alignment with international standards, particularly those of UN/CEFACT, to advance towards paperless trade. The experience illustrates the value of multi-stakeholder governance schemes and of public-private and international cooperation in moving the technology from pilot stage to adoption at scale.

Programme

• Institutional opening: Opening remarks by Nanno Mulder (ECLAC) and Camilo Mussi (STI/MAPA).
• Presentation of the current situation: Brief overview of the business context, presented by the Organic Production department. Renato Duarte da Conceição (SDA/MAPA).
• Presentation of the report: Technical presentation of the study's findings. Carlos Tabosa: technical section | Eduardo N. B. Leite: legal section.
• Question and answer session: Interaction with the audience.
• Closing remarks.