The power required to track the entire human industrial supply chain using a block-chain algorithm would be so incredible that it would quickly dwarf any possible gains. It would in fact be a significant percentage of all total power consumption in the world.
That's an absurd claim. It doesn't have to be incentivized through block rewards, but rather through multiple governments passing laws that they submit a certain amount of mining power. The hash rate could be orders of magnitude less than the current Bitcoin hash rate and still be secure against transactional fraud.
In fact it doesn't even need to be proof of work based, as long as all entities permitted to operate on the chain are known.
If the authority for verifying and authenticating entities is centralized, you don't need a blockchain. A centralized, publicly-readable database is the same thing.
Just because a single entity boots up a blockchain doesn't make it centralized. Satoshi set the initial rules for Bitcoin - does that make it centralized?
If there are 196 countries in the world they could all be registered as valid entities using their respective public keys. New entities could be added is through a soft fork of mining/processing nodes that add public keys to the list, and thus would be distributed consensus like other blockchains.
