GOMA and Norad Review Project Year One

The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) has released a second installment of funding for GOMA in the amount of 227,000 Euro.  The second installment was authorized after a joint review of the project by Norad and GOMA concluded that the project is making satisfactory progress on its work plan.  Two Norad Senior Advisors met with the GOMA Project Management Team at the IFOAM Head Office in Bonn, Germany on 18 August.   The Norad Advisors encouraged GOMA to aim its outreach  at a high level of governments in order to ultimately achieve its objectives concerning  adoption of the ITF Tools and Recommendations.  Norad was also interested to learn more about how GOMA will address the needs in Sub Saharan Africa.  In this latter regard, GOMA’s work plan includes supporting an equivalence evaluation of East African Organic Standards with the organic production and processing standards of the European Union.  GOMA is interested to use  EquiTool  and a summarized version of the European Regulation 834/2007 to assess the East African Standards.  The EU Commission Guidelines on Import of Organic Products into the European Union provide an option for assessing applicant standards for equivalence against either the full and literal the text of the regulation, or an “essential, short, plain-English version.”    The draft revised Annex of EquiTool  is a model for objectives and related essential requirements for organic production and processing.  Although it was not based on the EU regulatory text, it took the principles and objectives of the text into consideration.   An equivalence exercise using these new texts could potentially shed new light on how to judge equivalency while avoiding line-by-line equivalence assessments which  can lose sight of the forest from all the trees.