This means that some form of varietal declaration or contract, or affidavit will be required. The authors do not advocate widespread replacement of KVD by affidavits in the current environment. We also assume that if and when affidavits are used, they need not require an overly-complicated system of forms and paper trails. In this paper, affidavit merely refers to some form of varietal declaration. It is this concept, and not the details of how it might be implemented, that are important at this stage of the discussion.
Affidavits are likely to be a critical component of any non-visual quality control system.
As noted previously, especially until cheap, effective technologies are available to identify varietal composition of shipments from the farm forward, affidavits will be required to assign liability for problems detected after shipment. For example, farmers will have to sign affidavits attesting to the variety of wheat they deliver to a primary elevator. Likewise, the primary elevator will have to sign an affidavit indicating the varietal composition of rail cars shipped to terminals, and the terminals will have to do the same upon loading ocean vessels. If problems are detected, the source of the problem must be identifiable and those responsible held accountable. Currently, as long as someone knows that their wheat looks like CWRS and that it is a registered variety, for purposes of delivery and grading it doesn't matter what variety it is.