Food Social Security operating on GNU Taler?

Case Studies
1

In the past few years, the idea of democratically set up a Food Social Security has caught on in Belgium and France. Did it in your own countries? The idea here is to create an opportunity for everyone to access healthy, ecologic foodstuff whatever one’s revenue.

This topic proposes to discuss how GNU Taler could implement such a system.

1st draft

Scheme

For now, GNU Taler could operate such a design.

Exchange: a cooperative would plan the production accordingly to the situation (climate, water, needs, desires…) and pay the farmers/artisans fairly.

Wallets: people’s wallets are recharged monthly in euros (or any Central Bank Digital Currency, CBDC) via automatic wire transfers. An option could allow people to either get reductions or to contribute with a solidarity tax (by hijacking the age-restriction feature).

Merchants: unified accounts for local shops/market of the cooperative. They’d return their tokens against euros to the farmers/artisans.

Limitations

The current architecture of GNU Taler can only operate for market-driven economy: each transaction are supposed to happen between a customer and a supplier (merchant). it doesn’t allow a fair redistributions of the means within a whole cooperative. Thus the scheme depicted above would only work by transferring actual CBDC via wire transfers out of the GNU Taler infrastructure, which makes it not as efficient as it could be if it provided an internal split of the tokens, fairly redistributed to all the supply chain.

2

These kind of food cards for refugees for example are quite controversial, as it usually severly limits what people can spend the money on.

But I do think it could be useful in specific circumstances for example in countries with a weak banking sector and alternatives like so called “mobile money” charging predatory fees for small transfers.

3

I didn’t have this usecase in mind at all but you’re right to pinpoint such a shift for this concept. My initial idea was closer to the concept of health insurance cards that consists into tokens that the service will use to transfer money to the practitioners.

:+1: that’s another, very important usecase indeed.