A spat last week over a long-awaited EU-South American trade deal, on the heels of lobbying by commodity exporters to delay the European deforestation regulation, highlights the opportunity for food traceability specialists to smooth disputes by proving the environmental provenance of imports.

In October, the European Commission postponed the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which aims to ensure EU products and imports don’t contribute to deforestation, after lobbying by exporters such as Indonesia and Malaysia.

Separately last week, the CEO of French retail giant Carrefour, Alexandre Bompard, committed not to sell South American beef in France, on French farmer fears that a proposed free trade agreement between the European Union and Mercosur region, negotiated since 1999, would flood the French market.

The Group immediately backtracked, after a backlash threatened Carrefour Brazil, the company’s largest market outside France.

Traceability service companies can overcome these disputes, fears and risks, by providing much-needed transparency. They can provide “feedback loops”, for example, for growers to confirm their field boundaries, and local verifiers to confirm these, alongside related land use history including deforestation, filling gaps in digital mapping and land use in exporting nations.

At New Food Finance, we track deals and prices defining a “green transition” in food and ag. Our fund-raising platform shows that “Supply Chain MRV” is a significant growth theme (see Chart of the Week above), raising more than $600m to date.

We find 12 Brazil-based traceability companies, leveraging technologies such as blockchain and QR-codes, to enable distributed digital record-keeping, working with groups including Carrefour, JBS, GPA and Walmart. Following we briefly describe five of these:

• Agrosmart – Gathers farm and landscape-level climate and crop data, using farmer own record-keeping via its field notebook app, as well as by collating sensor data, using satellite images and public databases.​ The company says it has the largest climate intelligence platform in Latin America, and is present in countries including Brazil, the United States, Argentina and Paraguay.

• AgTrace – A traceability solution for tracking all stages in the food chain, from farmers to retailers, where users can input data across the product journey in various ways, from manually entering this on a web platform, to use of barcodes, data imports or via API. It says it uses blockchain technology to encrypt information.

• Btracer – A blockchain-backed platform which allows consumers to check every supply chain step via QR Codes, certifying the origin, manufacturer data, validity, and characteristics of a given product, and allows farmers and producers to gather records, invoices, and certifications into one tracking application.

• Safe Trace – Markets its own “Safe Trace seal”, for consumers interested to know where their food comes from, based on blockchain technology systems.

• PariPassu – PariPassu is a Brazilian agribusiness technology company, offering solutions for traceability, quality inspection and operations management in the food production chain, with services including a traceability code for food products, documentation records, and transparency services for farmers to input information on food origin.