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Child labour remains one of agriculture’s darkest open secrets. From cocoa to palm oil, millions of children, many under the age of 14, are still engaged in hazardous work across global supply chains. According to ILO/UNICEF, 160 million children are in child labour worldwide and about 79 million are in hazardous work, with agriculture the largest share. Despite years of pledges from corporations and certification bodies, enforcement remains weak, and proof of compliance often ends up buried in paperwork, unverifiable spreadsheets, or worse, not tracked at all.
But in a quiet corner of Ghana, a new kind of system is being tested, one that uses blockchain technology not to mint the next meme coin, but to verify whether the people picking your food are adults working voluntarily and safely.
A Partnership Between Tech and Soil
Fedrok, a Swiss Layer-1 blockchain built for climate action, carbon credit tokenization, and ESG data verification, has partnered with FarmRight Ghana, a local agribusiness founded in 2017, to roll out a pilot blockchain-based compliance system, that aims to eliminate child labour from participating farms.
The initiative, which is currently active with participating cocoa and palm oil farms in Ghana, combines biometric identification, real-time field inspections, and blockchain-based compliance records to build a tamper-proof record of ethical farming practices, all while creating access to better-paying carbon and impact markets.
“We’re applying blockchain to a moral imperative,” said Dr. Philip Blazdell, CEO of Fedrok. “This isn’t just about transparency for the sake of tech. It’s about protecting children and the environment while ensuring farmers benefit economically.”
The Mechanics: What’s Actually On-Chain?
Unlike many crypto projects that boast of “on-chain transparency” but never clarify what that means, Fedrok’s system goes deep.
Here’s what’s actually being tracked:
- Labour Compliance: Every worker on participating farms undergoes palm vein biometric scanning — a highly accurate form of ID — at hiring and payroll stages. This data is matched against government records (where available) to confirm that all workers are above the legal working age.
- Verified Contracts: Digital copies of employment contracts — with wage terms, job descriptions, and age verification — are logged immutably on Fedrok’s blockchain.
- Audit Logs: Independent third-party auditors conduct scheduled and random inspections. Their reports, digitally signed and timestamped, are stored on-chain.
- Community Reporting: Anonymous reports from community monitors and NGOs can be submitted and logged as part of a distributed oversight system.
All entries are time-stamped, geo-tagged where appropriate, and cryptographically sealed, a public view shows high-level status (for example ‘Child-labour safeguards verified’), with detailed records permissioned for privacy. In total, both social and environmental compliance metrics are tracked together, from child labour prevention to soil carbon retention, offering a ‘full-stack ESG’ view of every participating farm.
The Blockchain Behind It
The system runs on FDK, Fedrok’s Layer-1 blockchain. It’s EVM-compatible and optimized for high-frequency ESG data logging. The chain uses Proof of Green, Fedrok’s consensus approach that validates activity against verified environmental impact (for example, issuance/retirement of carbon credits or renewable-energy-backed operations) before it’s recorded on-chain.
“Every palm vein scan, every audit report, every carbon measurement — it all gets logged with a timestamp and a cryptographic seal,” said Blazdell. “This ensures there’s no way to tamper with the data after the fact.”
Buyers, regulators, and NGOs can access the compliance records via a tiered-access dashboard, or plug them into their own systems through a secure API. Fedrok’s ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certifications add a layer of process and environmental-management assurance that buyers recognize.
Supply Chains Are Under Global Scrutiny
The effort comes at a time when consumer and regulatory scrutiny over supply chains is intensifying. The European Union’s new Deforestation Regulation and upcoming Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) will require companies importing cocoa, coffee, and other commodities to prove that their supply chains are free from human rights abuses and environmental harm.
That proof, however, is hard to produce. Especially when much of the industry still relies on self-reported paper logs and supplier attestations. Blockchain, when coupled with real-world audits and biometric verification, offers a way to verify claims, not just make them.
It’s Not Just Compliance, It’s Revenue
What sets this partnership apart is the financial model behind it. Farms that meet both environmental and labour compliance standards can:
- Access carbon markets via tokenized carbon credits issued on the same blockchain
- Command premium pricing from ethical buyers in Europe and North America
- Qualify for impact financing, grants, or concessional loans tied to verified ESG performance
- Receive a blockchain-verifiable compliance seal suitable for traceability systems and packaging.
“It’s not enough to tell farmers to ‘do better.’ We’re making sure that doing better actually pays,” said Randy Boaitey, Managing Partner at FarmRight Ghana.
What Comes Next?
The initiative is currently active on a pilot basis, but Fedrok says expansion is already underway. Additional partnerships with certification bodies, Ghanaian ministries, and impact investors are expected in the coming months. There are also plans to open the compliance dashboard to consumer-facing platforms, allowing end buyers to verify farm-level claims through QR codes or traceability apps.
At a time when crypto headlines are often dominated by hacks, hype, or the latest token launch, this quiet project in Ghana shows how blockchain, combined with human accountability, might finally help solve problems that have plagued global agriculture for decades.
