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Organic norms that hurts the small producers
The "National Organic Program", the American organization responsible for organic certification, recently decided that the Internal Control System was not compliant with its regulation for the organic certification.
Recently, the "NOP" has decided to deny the organic certification of a Mexican group of producers arguing that its Internal Control System (ICS) had an improper structure. In that decision it was added that the certification agent has only selected a certain percentage of the growers for in-situ inspection while this was in conflict with the provision 204.403(a)(1), that specifies that each production units must be inspected. This requirement is unjustified.
In the last years, the IFOAM ( International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements) had been promoting the group certification as a way to give small producers an access to the organic market. According to the IFOAM, the Internal Control System is a documented quality assurance system that allows an external certification body to delegate the periodical inspection of individual group members to an identified body or unit within the certified operator. This means that the third party certification bodies only have to inspect the well-functioning of the system, as well as to perform a few spot-check re-inspections of individual smallholders. The decision of the NOP, to require the inspection of each production unit is in conflict with the IFOAM goal to reach an international consensus with the different national organic certification agent to recognize the ICS. The requirement of the NOP will also have a considerable impact on small producers, since it is a lot more expensive to have an inspector checking every grower, rather than only a percentage of them. On the other side, this requirement will favour the access to the organic market by big producers.
Actions have to be taken to prevent the NOP to impose this new requirement. The SCAA (Specialty Coffee Association of America) is very concerned about this issue. It is actually working on starting its lobbying process.
Here is a link to the decision about the improper inspection procedure and here is a link to the description of the provision 205.403, which, unfortunately, is only in French.
Here is a link to the IFOAM site promoting the Internal Control System.
