Tracing honey through African forests

Traceability is an important part of any food production system. Knowing where problems originate, ensuring quality and being able to demonstrate the provenance of your products are crucial when selling food to a customer.

This is no simple task when your product is honey that comes from the dense forests of Anderacha in South West Ethiopia, or the wide Afram Plains of Ghana. These remote locations are difficult to reach and have limited connections with the markets they supply. So how can you sure up production systems such as these without enormous investment into infrastructure?

Bees for Development has been developing a traceability and quality assurance system over the past two years that is now being used across multiple projects in multiple countries to assist beekeepers in proving the provenance of their unique products, ensuring honey quality, and giving buyers the confidence to know that should an issue arise, it can be traced back to its source and not cause a whole harvest to go to waste.

Our traceability system uses free offline compatible mobile software that allows for it to be used in remote areas without any internet connections. Once a signal is acquired all the collected data can be sent directly to the potential buyers who will be able to assess quality and provenance from anywhere in the world. All of the programs used are free to download and operate so it can be adopted with little to no cost.

In Ghana, beekeepers from the Afram Plains are selling their honeycomb to the Bees for Development Ghana Honey and beeswax processing centre. Every beekeeper is registered on our traceability system and their honeycomb is traced through the processing systems at the centre so that we can demonstrate which individual beekeepers contributed to each jerrycan filled with pure honey. Recently this has been taken a step further and into the packing and distribution stage. Bottles are being filled with honey that can be traced back to the beekeepers and demonstrate the quality checks that have been done throughout the process as well. This information is set to be made available to the consumers so that every person who buys a jar of ƐWOPA honey can see who produced it and learn a little about the beekeepers they are buying from, know the floral sources that were available at the time of harvest and be sure of the honey quality and authenticity.

This traceability system has also been expanded to other countries. In Anderacha in South West Ethiopia, we have introduced our traceability system to both forest honey and wild coffee cooperatives. Over the past months these cooperatives have successfully used the traceability system during their first honey harvest since its introduction. They are now able to demonstrate the provenance and quality of their honey enabling them to have a stronger bargaining position when selling their products to exporters. This is particularly important for the wild coffee producers, who will be using the system during the September coffee harvest, as new EU legislation mandates that all coffee imported into the EU will have to prove that its harvesting is not contributing to deforestation. A law that is likely to extend to other forest products in time.

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