Page 16 - Food&Drink August 2022 magazine

TRACK & TRACE
Sanctioning transparency
Pressure on the world’s supply chain from Covid has been compounded by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Kim Berry talks to forensic provenance and supply chain expert, founder and managing director of Source Certain, Cameron Scadding, about the work the company is doing to secure supply chain integrity and transparency for Ukrainian crops.
WHEN Russia invaded Ukraine, countries around the world decided on a course of financial sanctions as opposed to military intervention.
Founder and managing director of supply chain and forensic provenance company Source Certain, Cameron Scadding, says that as the war goes on and more sanctions are applied, there needs to be nuanced discussions about their implications.
While Covid had already disrupted commodity supply chains in the region, the Russia conflict heightened the focus on food security. But according to Scadding, “there is a lot more to this than, ‘we need more food’.
“There’s also a cost aspect; food needs to be affordable and it also needs to be able to get from one place to another.
sunflower seed (and oil). This year, 40 per cent of
Ukraine’s annual corn and wheat shipments were headed to the Middle East and Africa, two regions experiencing historic droughts.
“If you take a whole country offline, which happens to be a superpower when it comes to exporting food, of course you have supply chain ramifications and significant impact on the food security network,” he says.
Scadding points out that global supply chains work well when everybody is supplying, and everybody is buying.
UK CALLING
Source Certain has established credentials across myriad industries when it comes to forensic provenance, from Australian prawns to the
Russian grain as well be being mislabelled or misrepresented in the market.
Source Certain’s system builds a fingerprint database based on the scientific analysis of markers, like trace elements, found in grain sampled from Ukrainian farms.
Initially in Ukraine each fingerprint would represent a region, but the capability is there to create fingerprints at the farm level.
“The first phase of the work is to collect reference samples, which then enables us to get into the supply chain and do actual verification and investigations on where the particular grains have come from,” he says.
Next is surveillance or ‘in-market verification’ for grain sold in the market.
For the Ukraine project, Scadding expects that will be regulators or large customers wanting to ensure banned or sanctioned Russian grain isn’t coming into its supply chain.
And then there is supply chain communications telling all stakeholders inside the supply chain what the company is doing and why it is doing it.
“It is a very simple security strategy that says: ‘We are here, we are checking, and we
are pushing the bad actors out of the supply chain,” Scadding says.
MOVING QUICKLY
After establishing the service with the UK, which involves Ukraine and some bordering countries, the company will be able to verify where wheat, sunflower, barley, and maize has come from.
“It means that hopefully by next year we will be able to see if a grain export has been trans-shipped, mislabelled or country washed when it arrives at the importing company. It is happening very quickly.”
The process has moved quickly in part due to Scadding’s background, having grown up on a sheep and wheat farm in Western Australia.
“I have good networks so between those and industry connections, we have been able to find excellent contacts in Ukraine with industry-to- industry support. It has allowed us to be quite agile and get organised over there.
“By the end of this year, almost all the grain commodities coming out of Ukraine will be verifiable.
“If there is a claim it is Ukrainian, we will be able to
“ By the end of this year, almost all the grain commodities coming out of Ukraine will be verifiable. If there is a claim it is Ukrainian, we will be able to provide a clear picture as to where out of the Ukraine it has come from.”
“It’s less about there not being enough food and more that we can’t move it around cost effectively; or that it’s not as close to the end consumer as it needs to be.”
In 2021, Russia and Ukraine were in the top three global exporters of wheat, barley, maize, canola (and oil),
international diamond trade.
So much so, the UK government approached the company to see what it could do to protect the trade of crops grown in Ukraine.
For Scadding, the possibility was not only building a service for Ukraine to secure its grain trade and identify potentially stolen grain, but to identify
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