It is 2080. We are on a farm somewhere in Africa. Everything is digital. The blockchain is an omnipotent point of reference, and the farm is flourishing. But then, everything goes wrong. A dystopian short story, written exclusively for SEWOH.
March 20th 2025. Kwame Nkrumah University, Ghana.
On the night of March 20th 2025, in a hostel room at the Kwame Nkrumah University, a woman typed furiously away at a computer. The harsh light from the computer screen lit the darkness of the room, illuminating the sleeping form of her room-mate. The woman paused, squinting intently at the screen. She adjusted her glasses slightly, frowned and continued typing.
Her name was Fadi Donkor-Adjaye, a fourth-year student of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources and she was writing the last few lines of code for what she called the NotreAger project. It had consumed the last three years of her life and now, it was done. At 2:26AM, Fadi clicked the “Upload” button and five minutes later, NotreAger was live.
Her desire, she told the Student University Blog the next morning as she started her carefully crafted marketing campaign, was to create a centralized marketplace for African farmers. “For farmers, by farmers.” Its slogan was simple, concise and no-nonsense.
“Fadi Donkor-Adjaye’s NotreAger project is a big and bold initiative,” the University Blog gushed. “At its core lies blockchain technology, which ensures that all transactions along the agriculture value chain can be monitored, managed, enforced and traced efficiently and securely, from the purchase of seed for planting to the final check-out by a customer in a supermarket.
“For example, a farmer can know, from the comfort of their mobile device, which final product their coffee, beans or rice ended up in, right up to the store that sold it. This gives the farmer stronger negotiating power and higher income because they can provide proof-of-quality while studying the supply and demand forces that drive the sales and prices of the final product.”
The blog went on to boldly declare: “The middle-man is officially dead!”