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Group Certification: a perspective for northern farmers?
Enabling smallholders to continue producing organically and access organic markets is an important topic for IFOAM. The possible recognition of Internal Control Systems (ICS) for Group Certification in the Northern context is an important issue in this context. Indeed, organic producers of the North are still unable to benefit from group certification because the EU, Japanese and USA regulations on organic have not formally recognised and accepted ICSs. As a result, they do not in practice tolerate Northern farmers to be certified under group certification the way they do for Southern farmers. Yet there is growing evidence that the cost of individual certification is a binding constraint to many farmers in developed countries, and that group certification could be applicable and profitable in this context. There are also a handful of innovative experiments of group certification in northern countries, including in the USA, the EU and the Eastern Europe countries, which seem to indicate the relevance of ICS for targeted farmers in the North.
IFOAM's strategy
IFOAM has decided to take the lead on initiating stakeholder dialogues through international meetings, electronic consultations and pilot projects to be organized in the Northern countries, starting with Europe. This decision has been motivated by the following reasons:
a) The generally positive experiences of ICS in the South, with the concept of ICS combined with external inspection of the ICS having worked and proved to be often more efficient than single inspection of every farmer due to peer control,
b) The growing demand on the side of farmers of the North,
c) The innovative experiments carried out by several private certification bodies, and
d) The potential that ICS represent for the development of organic agriculture, not only in the North but also in Southern countries whose regulations are based on the EU regulation.
In November 2005, a first workshop was organized in Bonn (Germany) on “ICS in the North”. The workshop brought together representatives of 10 different organizations (certification bodies, farmer organizations and consultancies) from 7 different European countries to discuss challenges and opportunities of ICS adoption in Europe. The participants also explored the possibilities of initiating ICS pilot projects in Europe, and decided on the next steps to be taken to select and initiate such pilot projects. Proceedings of the workshop have then been shared more broadly with all interested stakeholders of ICS in Europe. A group certification pilot project is now implemented in Europe, running from August 2006 to March 2008. Experiences will finally be combined to produce documented and consistent lobbying tools and arguments in order to influence the northern organic regulations. All interested stakeholders are invited to contact the IFOAM head office at j.katto@ifoam.org
Towards group certification in Europe
Following the workshop in Bonn on ICS in Europe, IFOAM organized a broad stakeholder consultation. More than 700 stakeholders have received the proceedings of the Bonn workshop and were asked to react on it and get further involved in the European group certification pilot projects. IFOAM compiled stakeholders’ feedbacks, and at the same time built up a database of interested stakeholders in the region. IFOAM has then set up a pilot project to test group certification in Europe. The project includes partners from Turkey, France, Italy and Spain. This project runs from August 2006 to March 2008, and is managed by the consultancy AgroEco. The overall objective of the pilot project is to evaluate group certification in Europe and compare this with individual certification: how effective is it; how efficient is it; what other benefits does group certification have besides reducing certification costs (e.g. marketing, planning, quality improvement, advice); and can diversity in production and in marketing channels be accommodated in a model for group certification in Europe.
For any other information, please contact the IFOAM head office at j.katto@ifoam.org.
You can download the proceedings of the first workshop on ICS in the North (Bonn, November 2005), the report from the second workshop in BioFach 07 and other documents in English by clicking on the "dowload" links in the right column of this page.
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