Authent was a proud contributor to this publication (August 2024)

Working meeting with the colleagues in Mozambique (Maputo, july 2024)

Working visit to the museum for production of essential oil (still productive)

Simulation of a Witness audit in Georgia (almond production, third year of conversion)

Meeting up with the USA colleagues during the OTA reception at Biofach

Contribution to the AFI conference in Brussels (25&26 January), explaining the outline of Chapter 4 of the Vademecum for official investigations in relation to dectection of residues in organic products.

Very happy to be back at the ELKANA office, 4 years and 11 months after the adventure as a consultant in organic certification systems.

Students at work during the training on quality assurance training program (DITSL university, the week after Biofach, February 2024)

Overview of highlights of 2023

Salon international de l’agriculture de maroc (siam)

In May, Tom briefly presented one of the possibilities to import organic products into the EU. Before that, there were several meetings and visits to local organic projects.

workshop in view of developping organic production in morocco

In July, Tom returned to Morocco and hosted two workshops and was actively involved in the discussions.

internal audit

Also in July, Tom travelled to Asia and started the support in process for a domestic instituation to obtain recognition for compliance by the EU Commission.

Upscaling from domestic organic to eu organic certification

In July, Tom went to Sri Lanka. During three weeks a program involving trainings, internal audits, reviewing and bilateral exchanges of procedures and documents was carried out.

Back to Africa

It has been a long time since Tom was in Sub Sahara Africa. This time, it was for a week of intensive training and internal audit in view of preparing the CB staff for the requirements of the compliance regime.

Thailand

In November, Tom went again to Asia. Again three weeks of training and preparation of CBs for the certification of organic products for the EU. The picture was taken in a local supermarket in Bangkok and has been used in the training about labelling requirements.

Morocco (part 3)

In December, Tom hosted two workshops focussing on organic production in Morocco: strenghtening the quality manual of already certified organic operations and reducing burden in favour of more conversion to organic. This time, the interactive participatory approach worked very well.

Balkan (part 1)

In August, Tom travelled from France to Serbia and N. Macedonia. In Serbia, he acted as technical expert in the accreditatio process of two certification bodies.

balkan (part 2)

After the accreditation work, Tom travelled (by bus) from Belgrade to Skopje. There, two days of intensive training and discussions were organised for a domestic certification and a selection of staff members from the local competent authority. The organic wild origano oil turned out to be very helpful to reduce the negative impact of the airco in one of the hotel rooms.

Trainings on the EU Organic Regulation in North Africa

In April, Tom travelled to Tunisia for the training on the official control regulation (2017/625), the EU organic regulation (2018/848) and NOP. It was a 4,5 day training for civil servants of the different provinces in Tunisia.

It was particularly interesting to discuss the different topics to participants from a country which already has an organic regulation in place since many years and which has even been partly recognised as equivalent to the previous EU organic Regulation.

Focus of the training was on those organic products that are mostly exported by Tunisia.

Biofach Summer edition 2022

The unique Summer edition of Biofach was a very nice experience for Authent. Less is more… Tom reached out to the non-EU authorities to show the newest version of the Correlation table and had very interesting exchanges with many of them.

Tom sat in at many conferences, most of them related to certification, but assisted also in the very interesting presentations on new methods of plant protection without chemicals and new methods for evaluating authenticity of food products.

Assessment of the Georgian organic certification system

In August, it was time to go to Georgia. Meetings with key stakeholders of the organic certification system were followed by many on-site visits and interviews with pioneers of the Georgian organic movement.

The aim of the meetings was to identify shortcomings in the existing Georgian Organic legislation and formulate recommendations to update this in view of maintaining export of Georgian organic products to the EU.