TQA Australia is a not for profit, independent leader in quality solutions inspiring agri-business to be effective and innovative.

TQA Australia has been commissioned by Horticulture Australia Limited and the Federal Government, through the Caring for our Country program, to develop a recognition framework for environmental assurance systems in horticulture. The project has also been supported through the RIRDC Rural Women’s Award 2009.

The project runs from March to October 2009 and will develop a tool to enable key stakeholders, such as retailers, agrifood businesses and primary producers, to analyse the different environmental assurance systems available and identify system(s) that best meet their needs. The framework will provide a means of assessing the content and verification requirements of systems, thus enabling recognition of “equivalence”.

The aim of this work is to avoid the multiple-system scenario that exists in quality and food safety and promote the uptake of environmental assurance. The framework will reduce the time and effort that producers would have to commit to complying with multiple environmental assurance systems and increase the resources available for implementation and monitoring of environmental improvement.

For more details, please contact the TQA Australia office.