A funded research project at the University of Edinburgh into the use of blockchain economics and distributed ledger technologies to create market transparency for remote farming communities in the Caribbean.
The trading of digital currencies through distributed ledger technologies has in recent years been celebrated as a way to de-monopolise trade between producers and the global market — but this practice has prevailed almost exclusively within the Western socio-economic bloc — in many ways helping to increase power asymmetries and deepen social inequality that exists between developed and developing nations.
CariCrop is the outcome of a series of workshops held between the University of Edinburgh and Jamaica and St. Lucia Delegations of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture. CariCrop is a concept application network that uses crypto-currency to connect rural producers in the Caribbean to local Caribbean consumers — bypassing the traditional power structures of wholesale producers and international supply chain resellers.
The development of CariCrop was contributed to from a large group of academics, development partners, local authorities, businesses, and farming groups, over several years. The final research conference paper was published in April 2020.
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