Blockchain-Enabled Supply Chain Management: A Framework for Transparency and Traceability in Agri-Food Supply Chains

Abstract

The agri-food supply chain across South and Southeast Asia faces persistent challenges of fraud, opacity, and limited traceability that undermine consumer trust, food safety, and producer welfare. Blockchain technology, combined with IoT sensors and structured business processes, offers a promising approach to address these challenges. This paper presents a blockchain-enabled supply chain management framework for agri-food applications, with a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric 2.5 implementation, IoT sensor integration, IPFS off-chain storage, and stakeholder-facing applications. The framework was deployed in a pilot covering a rice supply chain from Vietnamese farms through Indonesian processing to retail distribution, with 15 participating farmers, 5 processors, 3 distributors, and 12 retail outlets. Performance evaluation using the Hyperledger Caliper benchmarking tool demonstrated transaction throughput of 1,200 TPS for queries and 380 TPS for invocations at a 4-peer configuration, with average latency of 187 ms and P95 latency of 412 ms. Scalability tests showed near-linear scaling up to 12 peers. Traceability time from farm to consumer was reduced from approximately 7 days under prior paper-based processes to 2.2 seconds through the deployed system. Infrastructure cost was approximately USD 0.0023 per transaction. Pilot stakeholder feedback indicated strong support for the framework, with specific value attributed to dispute resolution capabilities, food safety incident response, and consumer-facing trust building. The paper contributes a deployable framework, comprehensive performance benchmarks, and practical implementation guidance for blockchain-enabled agri-food supply chains.