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

New sustainability regulations such as the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) present market access barriers for Australian produce. From December 2024, EUDR bans most wood and agriculture products that have touched any recently deforested property, imposing due-diligence obligations on sellers that require verifiable evidence of compliance. EUDR is only one of 16 EU sustainability regulations, and the EU is only one of many export markets considering similar controls. Without a nationally scalable traceability and transparency architecture, Australian agricultural exporters faced the prospect of losing access to critical overseas markets.

Solution

GoSource was contracted by the Food Agility CRC (funded by DAFF) to conduct research into the policy settings, business incentives, and governance frameworks for a nationally scalable traceability architecture. GoSource was selected due to prior experience performing similar work for the United Nations.

Rather than pursuing the typical blockchain-based “central platform” approach (which has consistently failed to scale beyond low-volume pilots), GoSource proposed a “protocol over platform” interoperability standard. This allows all supply chain actors to choose any system, provided it conforms to the protocol — analogous to how any business can use any bank because they all speak the same payments protocol.

GoSource designed the Australian Agriculture Traceability Protocol (AATP) comprising three digital standards:

• Digital Product Passport — product-level traceability credentials
• Conformity Credential — auditable third-party evidence supporting deforestation and other ESG claims
• Traceability Event — standardised supply chain event data

Technical feasibility and business value were confirmed via a pilot implementation in the red meat industry. GoSource has subsequently been engaged to “industrialise” AATP by developing a governance framework and self-service implementation toolkit to scale from pilot participants to thousands of businesses nationally.

Outcomes

• Delivered a working standard and pilot implementation in under six months
• Enthusiastic support from a diverse range of stakeholders including farmers, feedlots, processors, software vendors, and certifiers
• Software vendors were able to implement AATP in weeks using free open-source tools, passing on low-cost benefits to their customers
• Certifiers gained a mechanism to increase the value of their deforestation compliance certificates through digital verification
• DAFF regards AATP as one of the few initiatives that can make a material impact on sustainability outcomes and export market access
• GoSource subsequently engaged to develop the national governance framework and rollout plan

Technologies & Methods

• W3C Verifiable Credentials and Decentralised Identifiers
• Digital Product Passports (aligned with emerging international standards)
• “Protocol over platform” interoperability architecture
• Open-source reference implementation and tooling
• Multi-stakeholder governance design
• User research and pilot validation (red meat industry)

Team Size

Not specified

Ethical Considerations

The development and governance of AATP requires ethical leadership to gain the trust of a wide variety of stakeholders, many of whom are competitors. AATP is a public good that must avoid any real or perceived conflicts of interest or undue influence from more powerful industry actors. GoSource leveraged its experience with multi-stakeholder engagement to establish clear principles and values. Transparency and honesty were foundational principles that quickly earned GoSource the trust of all pilot participants and led to the mandate to develop the national governance framework.

Sustainability

AATP is a sustainability project at its core. It not only provides data about sustainability practices but adds sufficient integrity to the data that it is trusted and valued by export markets. In a world of rampant greenwashing, verifiable data leaves unsustainable behaviour with nowhere to hide and empowers a “race to the top” where verified sustainability credentials become a valuable market differentiator.