It Is Too Early for QR Codes to Guarantee Agricultural Product Quality and Safety
Recently, a news story caught my attention. After one year of using a QR code traceability system for the grain and oil products used by 800 schools in Huizhou, Guangdong, schools and parents alike have been giving it a "thumbs up," believing that this move has greatly "improved" the quality and safety level of grain and oil in school cafeterias. Just by adding a tiny QR code on the packaging, schools and parents are satisfied. This inevitably makes one lament the dead diseased pigs that recently made their way into Dezhou, Shandong. Before they were transported into the slaughterhouse, they also had ear tags, and those ear tags also had QR codes on them. So can we also feel reassured about those pigs?
It is unclear since when QR code traceability and agricultural product quality and safety "came together"; and it is also unclear since when agricultural products that can be traced via QR codes have come to mean quality-and-safety-certified agricultural products. How did a tiny QR code become "a great leap forward" for agricultural product quality and safety? What is a QR code? This is what search engines say: "A QR code is a readable barcode. A device scans the QR code and, by identifying the binary data recorded in the length and width of the barcode, can obtain the information contained within it." At present, QR codes have functions such as information retrieval, website redirection, advertising push, mobile e-commerce, anti-counterfeiting and traceability, discount promotions, membership management, and mobile payment.
In this way, a QR code is more like a "link" to a webpage. Scanning it with a mobile phone is equivalent to "clicking" to enter the "webpage," and the quality of the agricultural product is like the content inside the "webpage." A "link" clearly cannot affect whether the content quality inside the "webpage" is good or bad.
Even if a QR code has anti-counterfeiting and traceability functions, it is still hard to equate it with raising the quality level. After all, QR codes guard against "counterfeits," not against "inferior goods." Determining whether an agricultural product is genuine can only be the first step in judging whether it is good or bad, but "genuine goods" do not necessarily mean "quality products." Moreover, in the era of "Ctrl C + Ctrl V," the anti-counterfeiting problem of QR codes themselves is still in the process of being gradually solved. Even with a QR code that ensures authenticity, there is no guarantee of preventing "inferior goods," because the authenticity of traceability information, namely "the content inside the webpage," is still "written" by people. For producers determined to violate laws and regulations, information traceability is still far from posing a threat.
Therefore, to effectively improve agricultural product quality and safety, the current level of QR code technology is still insufficient to bear such a great responsibility. Perhaps the real key to breaking the deadlock still lies in producers' self-discipline in production, regulators' strict law enforcement, and consumers' strong oversight. Only in this way can the problem of agricultural product quality and safety truly be resolved.