“When you look at rice seed and rice for the table, it’s almost impossible to distinguish between the two,” said Bright Simons, a Ghanaian entrepreneur who has developed technology to detect fake seeds, medicine and other products.

Almost 10 percent of seeds sold in Africa and South Asia are fake. This brings a huge cost for farmers, who can see harvests slashed, their families go hungry and bank loans remain unpaid if they are tricked, Simons told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“If your yield is cut by 90 percent, essentially you’re bankrupt,” he said in an interview. “Lots of farmers in Africa and Asia attempt suicide because their crops have failed - and some of that is due to fake or poor-quality seeds.”

But marking each seed packet with a unique code, sometimes hidden under a scratch-off coating, offers buyers a way to check their purchase is the real thing, Simons said at this week’s Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford.

At the till, buyers scan or type the code into their phone, and get an instant reply on whether the packet is genuine.

If it is not, manufacturers and retailers also receive a real-time alert and data to begin tracking down the culprits.

“It’s self-defeating (for counterfeiters) to copy the code - it just leads us to you,” Simons said. “Every time you try to game the system, you just give us more data.”

His firm mPedigree, launched more than a decade ago to take on counterfeiters, on Wednesday won a $1.5 million prize from the Skoll Foundation for its innovative work in using mobile and web technology to battle fake products.

The company, which works in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, has partnered with Fortune 500 manufacturers, dozens of telecom operators and government bodies, its website says.

It recently signed up the 19-member Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa to test mPedigree, with the aim of developing a region-wide seed verification system, said Simons.

Crucially, regulators have embraced the technology, the Skoll Foundation noted in a statement.

Kenya now requires verification labeling on seed for small-scale farmers, while Nigeria’s government mandates it on all malaria drugs and antibiotics.

Oladipupo Hameed, country manager in Nigeria for pharmaceuticals giant Roche, has worked with mPedigree for five years. “They have brought a solution to help us serve patients better and that’s what we’re about,” he said.

The mobile phone technology used is easily available, not something imported, he noted.

“It’s a local solution and it works quite well,” he added.