International harmonisation bodies

A first step towards international harmonisation of standards for the organic markets has been made with the adoption of the Codex Guidelines on the production, processing, and labelling of organically produced foods. However, there still are many obstacles to be overcome, and new obstacles are being raised by governments and private bodies in order to protect the domestic industry from imports. 

In 1992 IFOAM established the IFOAM Accreditation Programme to provide a means of harmonising standards and certification worldwide. The programme offered independent evaluation of inspection bodies against the Basic Standards and the developed IFOAM criteria of organic certification programmes. In 1997 they licensed the International Organic Accreditation Service to perform this function. 

A nonproprietary (official, approved, generic) name used in pharmacopoeias and chosen by official bodies the World Health Organization (WHO) chooses recommended International Nonproprietary Names (rINN). The harmonisation of names began 50 years ago, and... 

In the construction of the database, special attention was paid to the harmonisation of formats of data and metadata reporting, such as measurement units, in order to improve inter-comparability of the data among all EU Member States. The data collection formats recently proposed for harmonisation at the EU level (INERIS, 2007) are already incorporated in the database structure. Recommendations made by other international bodies such as lUPAC (e.g. Egli et al., 2003) were also taken into account. 

EWICS TC7 was set up to propose schemes, principles, procedures and guidelines to international bodies. In this it has succeeded to the extent that it now serves as a unique forum in Europe for the harmonisation between industries, countries and standards bodies. 

---