Implementing the IMS for Group Assurance

In the application of a standard for sustainable agricultural practices, an assurance system becomes crucial to facilitate members’ compliance with the standard. Conducting a group assurance helps improve the efficiency with third-party audits performed for system certification. This article discusses the first-tier assurance system conducted at group level.

Group assurance is a practice of organising individu-als or businesses into structured groups in order to streamline the assurance process for group members (a group of farmers). The group may consist of an organisation of individuals or businesses that acts as a single client for assurance purposes. The group can be formal or informal but must have a documented structure – the Internal Management System (IMS). Groups can be organised by commodity brokers, input suppliers, NGOs or by group members themselves.

In order to ensure the group is competent to perform its own assurance process, the group must have an internal management system (IMS) or internal control system (ICS) in place that instils confidence that the individual group members are meeting the requirements of the standard. At the same time, the management system plays a vital role in supporting learning for group members.

In the adoption of a sustainable rice standard, the Community Rice Centre (CRC) in Thailand can operate as IMS. BRIA as a project provides support to strengthen the IMS and to ensure that the system will be sustained by the CRC independently in the future. Additional support by Rice Department (RD) and Department of Agricultural Extension (DoAE) regarding Good Agricultural Practices (Thai GAP) will be most helpful to divide the tasks.

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Developing an Organizational Chart

Function Descriptions and

Risk Assessments

Annual Plan for Improvement & Data Collection for KPI’s

Capacity Building Program

Farmer List and Locations

Internal Standard

Agreements with Farmers/Members

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The organizational structure of the CRC is known. An organizational chart is required.

For a number of functions, the CRC has to consider appointing specific people, e.g. for training/learning, for sales/procurement and for internal inspection.

Basic function descriptions need to be developed together with the board of CRC and people have to be appointed for

team.

A basic risk assessment can be made by the first base-line data collected by BRIA. BRIA can assist CRC to set for this year the main priorities to work towards sustainable rice production of the farmer members. This tool can be improved for the next year crop cycle and form the basis of next year annual plan. A more thorough risk assessment including the views of the farmers organized by CRC management, can make future annual plans stronger.

The annual plan may be divided into 3 main topics:

• IMS – setting up the structure and main procedures with support of BRIA• Data collection at farm level by farmers and monitored support of BRIA• GAP and environment based on Thai GAP with support from RD and DoAE

For the first year, it is suggested that BRIA should manage and monitor the KPI’s according to the standard. The data can be shared with the farmers in the CRC to reflect on their performance and look at options for improvement. By next year rice season, this should preferably be

The purpose is to strengthen the skills, competencies and abilities of farmers.

The CRC has a clear list of their members.

The internal standard has to be developed, extracted out of the individual control points of the SRP sustainable standard.

The CRC should consider how to explain to the members about the benefits and the requirements of the standard. Also the approval and sanction procedure should be clearly communicated.

The table hereunder follows the recommended steps to implement an IMS. The actual situation requires that the program can be flexible to implement the recommendations based on the actual dynamics of the stakeholders involved.

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Soil fertilization program will be based on soil sample -

For the time being, the Thai GAP can be leading. This will

the sustainable rice program.

A social policy needs to be developed based on a proposed template and the actual situation.

The CRC collects rice from the individual farmers to sell to the miller/cooperative. The CRC has developed forms for this activity. It is suggested that BRIA should ensure this meets the requirements.

The complete internal inspection system needs to be worked out.

RD already has experiences with PGS (Participatory Guarantee System) for organic rice. This procedure can be most helpful when implementing the internal inspection for the SRP rice standard.

Within the IMS of CRC, a person or group of people should be appointed as the approval committee to take indi-vidual inspection records into consideration for approval, corrective measures or sanctions. A procedure is needed to make the process of decision making transparent for all members.

This procedure is designed to provide a framework for the

The recommendation is to take this up later in 2017.

The self-evaluation is to go through all control points of the standard and give the points according to the score. For this reason, the data collection tool is the most practical tool to do the self-evaluation. The scoring will determine the level of sustainability of the SRP sustainable standard. An external auditor needs to be appointed based on criteria to be developed by UTZ and presented to SRP as part of the assurance model.

UTZ will approve external auditors that meet the require-ments of accreditation.

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Soil Fertilization Program

Integrated Pest Management

Social Policy at IMS Level

Traceability

Internal Inspection

Approval/Sanction Procedure

Grievance Procedure

Self-Evaluation

External Audit

Article based on recommendations made by UTZ for BRIA in Thailand

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