What has GlobalGAP been working towards in the last 12 months?

The main aim of GlobalGAP is to translate consumer requirements into good agricultural practice.

We are continually improving the programme and are now coming towards the end of our regular review to upgrade the standard. We have had two major public consultations and been on a tour across five continents over two years - the biggest outreach we have ever done - so we could get out to our stakeholders and listen to them directly.

We presented the new elements of the version at Fruit Logistica in Berlin and we are in the process of trialling the standard now among our stakeholders - for example, with the retailer Aeon in Japan, which is a member of our technical committee. Trials are taking place on all the continents we have visited.

The sector committee will adjourn in June and we will take everything in from the consultations to see how applicable it all is. The new GlobalGAP Version 4 for 2011 will then be published at our conference in London in October. Our main aim will be to reaffirm our holistic approach of good agricultural practice.

In the last year, we have also been co-operating more and more with the public sector, which is looking now at legal compliance on issues such as microbials in the US and pesticide exceedances in the EU. Our co-operation with the Chinese government falls into this context, as they have benchmarked their own standard, ChinaGAP, against GlobalGAP. In the last year, we approved the first-ever government-owned auditing company in China.

What are your other big achievements over this time?

We have published Smallholder Guidelines, using the principle that there is no difference in the level of compliance needed for smallholders and for bigger growers. Smallholders must meet the same level and we want to empower the management of smallholder groups.

We have also published a Success Factor document, which helps small growers see how they can be successful with certification.

Another achievement was that in April we passed our 100,000th certified farm, including two-thirds that are certified under group certification schemes, so they have one certificate for the whole group. Group certification is particularly necessary for smallholders, for example in Africa. Such smallholder groups have contributed into the standard-setting process, and this will be reflected in the new GlobalGAP version.

We also work with government agencies on some different projects, such as the United Nations Council of Technical Assistance and Development, where the UN is facilitating a joint project between the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements and GlobalGAP to provide market access for small farms that grow organic produce and still meet the criteria.

Emerging markets is another area we are concentrating on, in which we include the US - at least with regard to certification activities. China and India are also big emerging markets for GlobalGAP. In India, the first pilot trials are underway to engage small farmers on a roadmap towards GlobalGAP. This enables them to get registered and have their first partial audits, so they get engaged into a path and can then be monitored.

How many benchmarked schemes are there now across the world and how do you ensure that there is a sense of trust in GlobalGAP and its benchmarked standards?

The following schemes are GlobalGAP fully approved standards: AmaGAP (Austria), Assured Produce (UK), ChileGAP, ChinaGAP standard and certification rule, IP Sigill GAP (Sweden), MexicoGAP, Naturane (Spain), Natursense (Spain), New Zealand GAP, QS-GAP (Germany) and UNE 155000 (Spain).

The following are provisionally approved standards that have received their corresponding benchmarking agreement but are awaiting formal accreditation of the responsible certification bodies: BanaGAP (France), JGAP (Japan) and KenyaGAP.

These standards have entered into the benchmarking process: ColombiaGAP, AT-GAP (South Korea) and ThaiGAP (Thailand).

GlobalGAP has set up an integrity programme that enables our highly trained experts to check the 130 certification bodies around the world that are licensed to us. This is a €500,000 (£419,000) programme aimed at maintaining and raising the level of trust in our third-party auditing.

We want to encourage a level of competition between the service providers to keep costs down for growers. The certification bodies now have the message that they have to be up to scratch. It took us two full years to get round every certifier and now we are continuing with that process.

Growers across the world often feel they have to adhere to too many certification standards. What is GlobalGAP’s response to this?

We are the recognised standard by the World Trade Organisation and are generally accepted as a good scheme, because we try to improve market access and we benchmark other standards to ours. Our standard-setting procedures are open and transparent, and I believe we are seen as making a lot of effort with harmonisation.

The challenge is to build a bridge between harmonisation on the grower side and the differentiation in the marketplace on the retailer side. Retailers want to differentiate on quality and sustainability issues with their private label ranges, and that all has the potential to add on to costs for growers.

Our positioning at GlobalGAP is that we are not a consumer label - we are a B2B programme that empowers and protects consumer brands. We therefore put our biggest efforts into continuing to engage with retailers in cost reduction for the industry and to build on that platform.

In terms of Assured Produce in the UK, content-wise it is very similar to GlobalGAP, but we are still in discussion to fully recognise and endorse our integrity programme. We have achieved what the National Farmers’ Union wanted, which was a level playing field for UK growers against imports.

We are 50 per cent retail governed but also 50 per cent producer governed, so we have that parity in our governance structure and that has reinforced our global position.

These benchmarked schemes reinforce the principle of what we do with the local and political support we get, and there is no single farm with both GlobalGAP certification and a GlobalGAP benchmarked standard certification. This is where we truly contribute to harmonisation.

GlobalGAP is increasing its work in the US. Can you tell FPJ more about this please?

We have a global approach and it is important to us that we now develop a national GlobalGAP guideline in the US, where the industry has taken much more of an interest in food safety recently.

Previously, we had 300 farms audited in the US and now we have some board members in the US, we can see increasing potential here.

Food safety legislation in the US is just in the making and we are working with the United Fresh Produce Association on this. The plans are there and there will be a much stronger GlobalGAP presence in the US in the near future.

What are the key issues you face as a good agricultural practice scheme?

What we must address is how we can be more authentic. How can we provide a tool for retailers to monitor their compliance to GlobalGAP in the supply base?

We have therefore developed a bookmarking tool for retailers to upload, so they can search for GlobalGAP members and then have a shortlist that they can customise, sort and export.

We have trialled this system at a retail level, but our eventual objective is to allow suppliers to build their own list and share parts of their online database with their customers, so that the retail desk doesn’t need to do all the searching. The idea is to eliminate paper certificates, so that everything is online.

This also links into our efforts in some markets, such as Germany, to put the GlobalGAP number on retail packs. This number is directly linked to a GlobalGAP certificate so that you can see the status of a producer on our database. Potentially, we could link this with the consumer to build a private label around our own website. It is a possible tool we could use to build some communication for consumers.

Another issue we face is tackling global water shortages. GlobalGAP has been working on a pilot project with Rewe to look into one region in Spain with the World Wildlife Fund, to address concerns over the legality of water extraction and minimising water use. This could lead to an add-on checklist for water usage that could be delivered for stakeholders using our GlobalGAP management platform.

On the social side, we have launched a public consultation with a social risk assessment, which has been trialled, developed and piloted with the retailers. This is a cost-effective and reliable risk assessment, not a social audit, but it does provide awareness of the issues and empowers producers to do it correctly in line with the guidelines.

What will be the key themes of the GlobalGAP Summit 2010?

First of all, it is a celebration - it will be our 10th-ever global conference. Our first EurepGAP meeting was in Hayes in Middlesex at Safeway in 1996, and Nigel Garbutt was already involved on the retailer side back then.

The other key element of this year’s summit will be to launch the new version of the standard and then reinforce the main topics outlined above.

One concept we will be discussing this year is how we look at our retail and foodservice members as anchors, and to see how they implement some of these issues in connection with GlobalGAP. Topics to be covered include the responsible management of resources, the monitoring of residues, smallholder programmes and certification integrity.

Summit 2010 will include contributions from Aeon, Anecoop, Conad Soc Coop, Coop, Fyffes Group, Marchelot, Metro Group, Morrisons, US Foodservice and Vion NV. Between 300 and 500 people are expected to attend.