Kristian Moeller, secretary of EurepGAP, told around 400 delegates at last week's biannual conference in Madrid that 12,106 growers had been certified by the scheme by the end of August.
The European retailer partnership's scheme now has more than 200 signed up members and associate members and Moeller said EurepGAP has significantly increased its international reach in the last 12 months.
An international speaker and delegate list illustrated the expanding interest in the harmonised approach to food production standards. Retailers as far afield as China and South Africa are on board, while the list of growers being audited takes in more countries by the month as 40 accredited certification bodies make their services available.
However, it is telling that less than 400,000 hectares of fruit and vegetable production area has been passed to EurepGAP standards so far, more than half of which comes under the benchmarked Assured Produce Scheme in the UK and a quarter of which is in the Netherlands.
The international expansion of interest is therefore not yet matched by advances in practice. Moeller said: "We expect the number of certifications to increase a lot in the northern hemisphere, particularly amongst French apple producers, as a number of business-to-business deadlines for compliance have been set for January 2004. Benchmarking national schemes against EurepGAP protocols is the way we want to go, and the numbers will also grow significantly in Chile and New Zealand as this process takes place."
Excluding the UK, potatoes, grapes and apples are the top three product categories so far certified.
From next month onwards, the EurepGAP website will include online certification of individual companies, accessible to registered users. By the end of the year, personalised data will be accessible through a centralised information database.
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