QR code to ensure the quality and safety of agricultural products? The time is not yet ripe

Recently, a piece of news attracted the author's attention. After a year of using the QR code traceability system for grain and oil products used by 800 schools in Huizhou, Guangdong, schools and parents have "liked" them, saying that this has greatly "improved" the quality and safety of grain and oil in school canteens. As long as a small QR code is added to the package, the school and parents will be satisfied, which inevitably makes people lament that the sick and dead pigs who flowed into Dezhou, Shandong Province not long ago also had ear tags and QR codes on them before they were transported into the slaughterhouse. So, can we also rest assured about those pigs?

I do not know when the QR code traceability and the quality and safety of agricultural products have come together; and I do not know when the agricultural products that can be traced to the QR code mean the quality and safety of agricultural products. How can a small QR code become a "big step forward" for the quality and safety of agricultural products? What is the QR code? It is said on the search engine, "the QR code is a readable bar code. The equipment scans the QR code and obtains the information contained in it by identifying the binary data recorded in the length and width of the barcode." At present, the QR code has the functions of information acquisition, website jump, advertising push, mobile e-commerce, anti-counterfeiting traceability, preferential promotion, member management and mobile payment and so on.

In this way, the QR code is more like a "link" of a web page. Scanning through the mobile phone is equivalent to "clicking" to enter the "web page", and the quality of agricultural products is like the content in the "web page". "Link" obviously does not affect the quality of the content in the "web page".

Even if the QR code has the function of anti-counterfeiting traceability, it is difficult to equate with the improvement of quality level. After all, the QR code protects against "fake", not "bad". Judging the authenticity of an agricultural product can only be the first step in judging its advantages and disadvantages, but "real goods" does not mean that they are "superior products". Moreover, in the era of "Ctrl C+Ctrl V", the anti-counterfeiting problem of QR code itself is still in the process of being solved step by step. Even with a fidelity QR code, there is no guarantee that it can prevent "bad", because the authenticity of the source information, that is, the "content in the web page", is still "written" by people. Tracing the source of information is far from a threat to producers who are determined to break the law.

Therefore, to effectively improve the quality and safety of agricultural products, the existing level of QR code technology is not enough to undertake such a task. Perhaps, the key to really breaking the situation still lies in the production self-discipline of producers, the strict law enforcement of regulators and the strong supervision of consumers, and only in this way can the quality and safety problems of agricultural products be really solved.