NASAA Organic offers a variety of support services to the organic industry and to all agribusiness value and supply chains.

Please contact us and we can design a tailored support package for you.

Certification Support – Demystifying the Process

Becoming certified to organic regulations can be challenging. NASAA Organic offers support and guidance for all supply and value chains to become organic certified to all organic regulations and standards.

No matter if you are a small scale producer or a large supply chain, please contact us to prepare for certification.

Maintaining certification requires good oversight and detailed commitment. Amendments to your production may result in additional compliance requirements. NASAA Organic can provide certification and compliance support.

Need clarification prior to your annual audit? Reach out to us to guide you for audit preparation.

NASAA Organic offers support from input approvals, Export clarifications, to overall documentation and management compliance.

Please contact us on (08) 7231 7700 or email carolin.moeller@nasaa.com.au for any individual supply or value chain support, compliance assessment or certification clarifications under all global certification schemes for voluntary sustainability standards including PGS.

Fraud Prevention Training

The organic market grows rapidly all over the world. The flow of trade is becoming more and more international and there is a shortage in the supply of various commodities. This leads to a situation where those who do not take the organic requirements seriously are tempted to enter the lucrative market.

Even if the organic market has currently the best quality management system of the whole food market, unfortunately fraud is still an issue.

To protect the integrity of the organic industry, NASAA Organic is to improve cross border communication among inspection and certification bodies, trade companies, label organisations and authorities to strengthen organic integrity. But foremost, NASAA Organic supports certified operations to ensure true transparency to highlight their integrity.

One main driver is the change in the USA regulation to include fraud prevention as part of every certified operation based on a fraud prevention program and plan.

The USA based Organic Trade Association OTA developed a training and support program for operators to comply to the new requirements and transition smoothly in terms of fraud prevention and improve transparency and product traceability.

To bring this program to operations, OTA unites with organic industry affiliates, such as NASAA, to have approachable supporting partners. A Supporting Partner is a stakeholder in the organic industry who is committed to organic integrity and fraud prevention. Supporting partners are well versed in the Organic Fraud Prevention Solutions enrolment process, developing, and evaluating Organic Fraud Prevention Plans, and are committed to promoting Organic Fraud Prevention Solutions enrolment to their clients and network. Online trainings are required for this role.

NASAA Organic is honoured to announce that we are the first Anti-fraud OTA Supporting Partner outside of the USA and EU.

We are committed to support organic certified operations and future certified operations to comply to the new USDA SOE requirements within the given timeline.

You can download the OTA’s fraud documents here.

Please contact us on (08) 7231 7700 or email carolin.moeller@nasaa.com.au for any individual supply or value chain support or training on Fraud Prevention.

 

Grower Group Internal Control Systems

About 80% of the world’s organic producers are smallholders in low and middle income countries, for whom individual certification would be unaffordable and administratively too complex to manage. These producers are recognised as organic due to group certification, a system in which groups of farmers implement an Internal Control System (ICS) and are certified by a third party certification body, which assesses the performance of the ICS and performs a representative number of spot‐check inspections of group members. Group certification is based on the shared surveillance between the certifier and the group’s management system ICS to inspected and approve all growers and their compliance to the organic regulation together.

The approach of using ICS based group certification was pioneered by IFOAM – Organics International (IFOAM) and NASAA Organic. Since recently the system of group certification have been taken up by entire sector, including the newest EU regulation and the newly developed US regulation Strengthening Organic Enforcement.

NASAA Organic is providing this certification to small scale farmer groups in the Pacific and South East Asia for over 30 years, allowing them market access and secured livelihoods.

Furthermore, NASAA Organic is continuously proving train the trainer and staff competencies  workshops in the Pacific on ICS and grower group certification criteria, supporting the farmers to manage compliance.

NASAA Organic offers support in understanding all requirements on how to establish and maintain an Internal Control System against all global regulations and standards.

Please contact us on (08) 7231 7700 or email carolin.moeller@nasaa.com.au for any individual supply or value chain support or any competency trainings, presentation, or workshops.

Digitisation and Data Management

Organic farming is modern, holistic and knowledge intensive and the more information farmers have, the better they can apply prevention strategies, take sound decisions and act or not act in a timely fashion. In current times, no industry (including the organic industry) can ignore the need for clean, relevant data and digitalisation.

Furthermore, organic certification is strengthening its reliability, and aims to reduce bureaucratic burden. A key element of these changes is to make full use of available data and interlink the sources of such data that are managed by different public authorities or private bodies. A theoretically “simple” connection of data sources would already benefit the certification system and relieve farmers.

NASAA Organic connects with industry affiliated partner to bring integrity solutions to the organic sector for big data management and digitalisation is in organic agriculture to ensure efficient farm and compliance management, provide sufficient information for decision making, as well as to combat fraud and disclose true traceability and integrity of the organic supply and value chains.

True Cost Accounting

True Cost Accounting in food and agriculture is about looking at the real costs and benefits of different ways of producing food. Many of the ways we produce food can harm the environment, animals, and people’s health, but we don’t usually think about or pay for these costs when we buy food.

We are actually paying for these costs in ways we don’t see, like when we pay for clean water that has been treated to remove pesticides, or when we pay taxes that fund cleaning up the environment.

We also pay for the cost of healthcare for diseases caused by unhealthy diets. Sometimes these costs get passed on to future generations or other countries, like when climate change and soil degradation happen or when rainforests are destroyed and species go extinct.

NASAA Organic can support value chains delivering the message to the public that organic agriculture does not externalise the costs like conventional agriculture does, and facilitate True Cost Accounting (TCA) for your operation.