Overview
Market place certification standards may contribute to agricultural transformation by defining minimum requirements for sustainability within an economic framework that is set up to recognize and reward high quality production with limited health and environmental impacts.
Certifying bodies seek to address many criteria of sustainability including worker protection and rights, biodiversity protection, and good agricultural practices, but face a constant challenge of reconciling goals for production with those for protection.
We partner with leading standard-setting and certification bodies to implement IPM as a requirement for crop certification globally, focusing in particular on adoption of reduced-risk, biologically based pest management practices, and reduction in pesticide risks to human health and the environment. We also develop and provide education and training for certification auditors, and for farmers who seek crop certification.
Goals
- To maximize the contribution that state-of-the-science understanding and procedures can play in the further development of standards for agricultural protection that can verifiably advance sustainability.
- To work with certification bodies to scale-up adoption of sustainable practices to encompass a significant proportion of global agricultural production.
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To educate auditors and farmers in sustainable agricultural practices
Key Activities and Outputs
- Since 2009, we have worked with the Food Alliance to establish a new, generic model for IPM that incorporates preventative practices, and which emphasizes biologically-based IPM, and pesticide risk management. This approach builds upon the “Prevention, Avoidance, Mitigation and Suppression (PAMS)” model for IPM that was advanced in US National Roadmap for IPM. We developed Food Alliance Standard module 9, that addresses IPM and pesticide risk.
- Since 2010, we have worked with Salmon Safe to employ our pesticide risk assessment tool IPMPRiME(see: Pesticide Risk Assessment and Management in West Africa) within their requirements for farmers and vineyard managers.
- Since 2015, we have worked initially in the Technical Advisory Committee of the Sustainable Agriculture Network, and key partner, the Rainforest Alliance, to build IPM, pesticide risk management, and pesticide hazard elimination within their certification standard setting process. The completed standard, which went through extensive public consultation, was published in 2017.
- Since 2017 IPPC has signed an MOU with the SAN to explore a unique partnership in advancing sustainable agriculture internationally.
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Since 2017, we have joined the ISEAL IPM Coalition Partnership to advance effective IPM and pesticide risk management throughout global certifying bodies.
IPM Impacts
The Food Alliance and SAN standards have reached over 1 million farmers in 50 countries, and they will benefit from reductions in the use of hazardous pesticides, while being recognized in the marketplace for use of IPM practices that are less reliant upon inputs.