Helping export companies in EU Third Countries

A new international standard ‘Equivalent European Union Organic Production Processing Standard for Third Countries’, has been drawn up by the Italian certification body ICEA, working with the other accredited certification bodies from Italy. The Standard is intended to become the accurate point of reference for all the companies certified by ICEA in Third Countries that want to export their organic certified products to the EU. However, it can also be used by any exporting company and certification body from a Third Country.

This Standard has been developed from the European Regulations (EC)834/2009 and the more detailed implementing rules in (EC) 889/2008. It combines, rationalises and simplifies these two documents, adapting them for use outside the legal framework of the European Union. The aim of the Standard is to provide an equivalent production rule that may be used by operators for gaining certification equivalent to that described in (EC)834/2007, and thus access to the European market.

All the requirements that the two original Regulations include on the control system and many administrative requirements relevant to government authorities and the European Commission itself have been removed. This leaves only the requirements that need to be applied by operators. Control bodies using this Standard will be required to demonstrate that they apply equivalent control measures to those required within the EU.

Where specific clauses of the original Regulations make reference to institutions, services or technical requirements, either not available, not relevant, or inappropriate to countries outside of the EU, an alternative measure, which is intended to be equivalent, is applied.

For example: The standard states that the responsibility for granting the authorisation for using non-organic seed when organic seed is not available,may rest with the control body. The EU Regulation 834/2008 states that it is a responsibility of the EU Member States, although Member States are allowed to delegate the responsability for granting the authorisation to the control bodies.

The standard is written as a checklist, with clear headlines and a column to indicate the article of reference in the Regulations and another column to indicate if the standard is in compliance or if it is equivalent to the EU Regulations (see box below).

The standard also includes all the Annexes that are included in EU Regulation 889/2008.

Nuria Alonso

The standard, available in English, can be downloaded here