Efforts to benchmark Chile’s Good Agriculture Practices (ChileGAP) against ChinaGAP have gone well, according to the president of Chile's Foundation for Fruit Development (FDF) Jaime Lavados.
The benchmarking has been in the works for about a year, and Mr Lavados said he expects the agreement will be signed in August.
“ChileGAP is already recognised in Europe and the US,” he told Fruitnet. “Now it’s going to be benchmarked against ChinaGAP, which could make it the most diversified national standard in the world.
“The protocol has bilateral approval; if a Chilean producer has passed ChileGAP, it will enter the Chinese market with the ChinaGAP approval stamp. In the case of China it’s a big advantage over any other supplier in the world.
“We worked very hard on the technical aspects and two-way communication, in terms of getting the two protocols to match. We believe ChileGAP has come a long way with these benchmarking processes.”
In an effort to make ChileGAP as simple as practical, despite having to fit the requirements of such a diverse range of markets, the standard includes a provision for one revision per year.
“We take a lot of care to make it easy to use, and to make it technically very sophisticated, but also cost effective,” said Mr Lavados.
