Australian Agriculture Traceability Protocol (AATP)

GoSource designed the Australian Agriculture Traceability Protocol to help exporters meet sustainability regulations through interoperable digital traceability and verifiable compliance evidence.

Challenge

From December 2024 the EU Deforestation Regulation bans most wood and agricultural products that have touched recently deforested land, and puts the burden of proof on the seller. Not a declaration: verifiable evidence.

EUDR is one of sixteen EU sustainability regulations, and the EU is one of several markets heading the same way. For Australian exporters the question was not whether to comply but whether the country had any way to prove compliance at scale. Without one, market access goes.

Solution

Food Agility CRC, funded by DAFF, engaged us to research the policy settings, business incentives and governance a national traceability architecture would need. We got the work off the back of doing something similar for the United Nations.

The default approach to this is a blockchain-backed central platform, and it has failed to get past low-volume pilots every time it has been tried. We proposed the opposite: protocol over platform. Every actor keeps whatever system they already have, as long as it speaks the protocol. Any business can use any bank because the banks agreed on a payments protocol, not because somebody built one bank.

The Australian Agriculture Traceability Protocol has three parts. A Digital Product Passport carries traceability at the product level. A Conformity Credential carries auditable third-party evidence behind a deforestation or other ESG claim. A Traceability Event standardises what happened and when.

A red meat pilot proved both that it works and that it is worth doing. We have since been engaged to industrialise it: a governance framework and a self-service toolkit to take it from pilot participants to thousands of businesses.

Outcomes

A working standard and a pilot implementation inside six months.

The support surprised us in its breadth: farmers, feedlots, processors, software vendors and certifiers, who do not usually agree on much. Vendors implemented AATP in weeks using free open-source tooling, which is what keeps the cost off their customers. Certifiers found their deforestation certificates were worth more once they could be verified digitally.

DAFF considers AATP one of the few initiatives capable of moving the needle on both sustainability outcomes and market access. We now hold the mandate for the national governance framework and rollout.

Technologies

W3C Verifiable Credentials and Decentralised Identifiers. Digital Product Passports aligned to emerging international standards. A protocol-over-platform architecture. Open-source reference implementation and tooling. Multi-stakeholder governance design, validated through the red meat pilot.

Trust between competitors

Most of the people who have to adopt AATP compete with each other. It only works as a public good, which means no participant can be seen to have captured it, and the bigger players cannot be allowed to shape it to their advantage.

We leaned on the multi-stakeholder experience from the UN work and set the principles out in the open early. Transparency was the whole strategy, and it is why pilot participants trusted us with the governance framework afterwards.

On greenwashing

AATP does not just carry sustainability data, it carries enough integrity that an export market will act on it. That changes the incentive. When a claim can be checked, unverified claims lose their value, and businesses doing the real work finally have something that distinguishes them.