Why Ohalo?

Amidst everything going on in our world today, from the COVID pandemic, the climate change, and water shortage all the way to the threatened genetic diversity, species extinction, and ecosystems collapse. we at ohalo.io are taking down the challenge of building an internet of food to solve for these global issues while ensuring food security, sustainable production, and fair compensation across the food supply chain

Our history with food seems to be much more complicated than we initially thought, the findings from Ohalo site invited scientists to reconsider conclusions about the earlier history of human settlements and farming activities. From the excavations in the site, scientists found preserved edible cereals and evidence of agricultural activity within a hunter-gatherer society, alongside some tools and evidence for rudimentary breadmaking.

By the early Neolithic age, humans were reinventing agriculture and perhaps civilization from scratch. Until very recently scientists believed farming started 12,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent — around current Irak Turkey and Iran — a region believed to be the cradle of civilization, and from there, agriculture later spread to Europe and other regions, it is then believed that agricultural activity gave birth to sedentary settlements all the way to full-fledged civilizations with political, cultural and economic systems.

Back then agriculture was very primitive and farming technics evolved slowly throughout the ages. Humans learned to domesticate and select plants for farming, sharing the knowledge across geolocations and generations, and until very recently, some ancestral agricultural techniques were still practiced -in remote corners of the world- sharing strikingly similar technics and wisdom, and now being lost to the industrial wave of agriculture.

The food industry is a multi-trillion dollar activity, globally producing and moving around 3000 tones of produce every minute (1488307.46 mKg in fruits, nuts, vegetables, and cereals during 2020), and racing against the challenge of feeding an ever-growing population. Plant productivity has been improved many folds with scientific research in genetic materials, chemicals use. Vast monoculture plantations, heavily automated were born reducing the marginal costs, and the yield has been pushed to the limits with precision and smart farming, today perhaps like in the old ages technology is a driving trend in the food industry.

With more than 7.8 billion people on the planet, The industry is facing existential challenges and struggling to meet the demand. The water shortage derived by climate change is becoming a global concern, raising regional conflicts around water are putting more stress on the food industry and pushing out small farmers into high conflict zones, While the climate extremes are pushing farmers out and producing mass climate migrations from desertification and recurrent floods.

In most regions of the world, only big plantations with access to capital and influence can still survive both climate and economic hardships. Scale, chemicals use, and mechanization is the trend in today’s industrialized farming, crop yield is attracting more farmers to abandon ancestral crops threatening the global genetic diversity, and in a vicious cycle pushing more farmers into a toxic dependence on chemicals use.

More land is being degraded due to the heavily industrialized agriculture practice and globalization economics is luring farmers into lucrative crops regardless of water shortage situations or ecological concerns. While the food quality is declining and the nutritional value is lost to the race for better yielding crops.

With the food industry being one of the most concerned with labeling fraud, many food labels have been effortlessly trying to meet the rising consumer demand for a fair, healthier, and sustainable food system. Many labels today promise the consumers to verify the food origin, the production conditions, and ensuring respect of regulations and processes. Fairtrade, Non-GMO, and bio labels have had great traction with customer and farmers from all around the world, these labels are leading the way for the food industry transition and comforting the consumer to some level about the food they consume and its environmental impact.

Communities and organizations around the world are coming together to evolve our farming practices. In Europe, biological agriculture standardization is gaining traction among farmers and been heavily subsidized to meet the market, and everywhere in the world small communities are coming around permaculture designs and restoration camps, developing new technics and practices to produce food, and bring back ecological balance.

The ecological transition is slowed down by our legacy systems. The food supply chain has evolved and twisted slowly over the years to fit the cogs of our economical systems, the efforts to transition the current food system are faced with many challenges derived from our value and operations systems. The alarming situation requires a much more fluid and coordinated transition, thus requiring reinventing many things across the food supply chain, a fully transparent supply chain is the first step toward this mission.

We believe the internet and the sharing economy is key to bringing a solution to these global challenges, that’s why we founded ohalo.io.

We are building an internet of food platform to accelerate the food supply chain’s ecological transition. We aim to bring engaged actors together and use the advantages of the internet and the sharing economy to provide viable alternatives, consumers will be able to access trusted and verifiable information about the food they consume and will be able to make sure it meets their authentic standards and moral values.

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