GLOBALG.A.P. Certification for South African Growers: IFA, Chain of Custody and the Audit

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FARM ASSURANCE · GLOBALG.A.P.

By Mthokozisi Nkosi, food scientist, registered Lead Auditor with Exemplar Global and IRCA, and one of four SAATCA registered R638:2018 Lead Implementers. Founder of ASC Food Safety Consultants. Last updated 9 September 2026.

What is GLOBALG.A.P. certification and who actually asks for it?

GLOBALG.A.P. is a private, business to business farm assurance standard. No South African law requires it. What requires it is your buyer. European and United Kingdom retail chains, their importers, and increasingly the larger South African retailers and exporters make a valid GLOBALG.A.P. certificate a condition of the purchase order. The certificate proves how the crop was grown, not how the shop sells it.

A Certificate of Acceptability under Regulation R638 of 2018 is a legal requirement issued by a local authority, and we cover it separately in the 2026 R638 and CoA compliance guide. GLOBALG.A.P. is the opposite: voluntary in law and compulsory in commerce. You can be fully compliant with South African health regulations and still be locked out of a European retail programme because you hold the wrong edition of IFA.

Every certified operation is issued a thirteen digit GLOBALG.A.P. Number, the GGN, which lets any buyer down the chain look up your certification status.

IFA v6 Smart or IFA v6 GFS: which edition is the GFSI recognised route?

This is the single most expensive misunderstanding in South African farm assurance. IFA version 6 is published in two editions. GLOBALG.A.P. describes IFA v6 Smart and IFA v6 GFS as parallel and equally valid editions serving different market needs. They are not two levels of the same thing, and they do not carry the same market recognition. For fruit and vegetables, only the GFS edition is GFSI recognised.

GFSI, hosted by The Consumer Goods Forum, benchmarks certification schemes. It does not certify anyone, so there is no such thing as a GFSI certificate, only certification to a GFSI recognised scheme. On 6 August 2024 the GFSI Steering Committee granted recognition to Integrated Farm Assurance GFS Plants for Fruit and Vegetables v6.0, covering scope BI, farming of plants other than grains and pulses, and scope BIII, pre-process handling of plant products. It also granted recognition to Integrated Farm Assurance SMART/GFS for Aquaculture v6.0 under scope AII, farming of fish and seafood.

Read that carefully, because it is where growers get hurt. For plants the recognised programme is the GFS edition. A grower certified to IFA v6 Smart for fruit and vegetables holds a genuine, valid GLOBALG.A.P. certificate, and for many buyers that is enough, but it is not a GFSI recognised certificate. Where a supplier approval policy asks for “certification to a GFSI recognised scheme”, Smart will not satisfy it.

I sat with a stone fruit grower who had just paid for a full first audit and passed it cleanly. His certificate said IFA v6 Smart. His buyer’s supplier approval document, which nobody on the farm had read past the first page, asked for certification to a GFSI recognised scheme. He held a real GLOBALG.A.P. certificate and the wrong one, and the fix was a second audit in the same season. Ask the buyer in writing which edition they accept.

Which GLOBALG.A.P. scopes exist and which South African products need which?

IFA version 6 covers plants and aquaculture. Within plants, the product categories include fruit and vegetables, flowers and ornamentals, plant propagation material, combinable crops and hops. Aquaculture covers farmed fish and seafood. IFA for livestock is a legacy solution: GLOBALG.A.P. lists pigs, dairy, cattle and sheep, poultry, turkey and calf or young beef as discontinued, with audits possible only until 31 December 2023.

For a South African grower the mapping is direct.

On top of the scope you can add modules. GRASP, the GLOBALG.A.P. Risk Assessment on Social Practice, is an add-on at version 2 covering workers’ health, safety and welfare, assessed alongside the IFA audit. South African growers will also meet SIZA, the Sustainability Initiative of South Africa, whose environmental add-on can be combined with the IFA audit so the farm is not audited twice for the same ground.

What is GLOBALG.A.P. Chain of Custody and who needs it?

Chain of Custody is the supply chain half of GLOBALG.A.P. It does not assess how anything is grown. It assesses whether the certified product that leaves a farm is still the certified product that arrives at the buyer, without being mixed, diluted or substituted along the way. The current version is CoC v6.1, published in November 2022, which replaced v6 on 1 July 2023.

The trigger is ownership and control, not activity. The General Regulations put it plainly at clause 4.4.2(a):

Any party in the supply chain that takes legal ownership and/or physical control over a certified product falls within the scope of this standard.Clause 4.4.2(a), GLOBALG.A.P. Chain of Custody General Regulations v6.1

In practice that means the businesses between the orchard and the container: independent packhouses, cold stores, ripening and repacking operations, processors, traders, agents that take title, and exporters. If you buy certified fruit, hold it and sell it on as certified, you are in scope. Handle it without making a GLOBALG.A.P. claim and you are not.

The exclusions are equally specific. Freight forwarders who never own the product sit outside scope, as do retailers who buy, handle and sell certified product only in consumer ready, tamperproof packaging to the final consumer, and companies that handle product from certified sources but never identify or sell it as certified. And, decisively for growers:

Production processes which are IFA-certified are beyond the scope of this standard.Clause 4.4.3(a), GLOBALG.A.P. Chain of Custody General Regulations v6.1

So a grower who packs their own fruit inside their own registered IFA production process does not need a separate Chain of Custody certificate. The moment a different legal entity takes over, that entity does.

The version of this I see most often is a packhouse manager who has bought the wrong course. He calls because his exporter wants a GLOBALG.A.P. certificate, and he has spent a week inside the IFA plants checklist wondering how a business with no orchard evidences water source risk assessment and spray records. Nothing on his site is farmed. He receives certified fruit, cools it, repacks it and sells it on with the claim attached. Chain of Custody was always his standard.

Note on livestock: Chain of Custody applies to livestock only through the legacy IFA version 5 scopes. Under IFA version 6 the Chain of Custody product scope is plants and aquaculture, so a livestock operation should confirm its current certification route with its certification body before enrolling.

How do IFA and Chain of Custody fit together from orchard to container?

Follow one pallet of table grapes from the block to the container and the two standards stop being two standards. IFA certifies the production process. Chain of Custody certifies every subsequent business that owns or controls the product and keeps making the claim. If any link is uncertified while still selling the product as GLOBALG.A.P., the claim breaks there and everything downstream cannot support what it is selling.

The Chain of Custody General Regulations tie the two together explicitly:

The CoC standard certification product scope includes the IFA scopes (for IFA version 5: the scopes crops base, aquaculture, livestock base, and all sub-scopes; for IFA version 6: the scopes plants and aquaculture, and all product categories).Clause 4.4.1(a), GLOBALG.A.P. Chain of Custody General Regulations v6.1

A typical Western Cape table grape flow looks like this. The farm holds IFA v6 GFS for fruit and vegetables and packs in its own registered packhouse, so no Chain of Custody is needed there. The fruit moves to an independent cold store that takes physical control, and that cold store needs Chain of Custody. The exporter takes legal title and sells with a GLOBALG.A.P. claim attached, so the exporter needs it too. The shipping line never owns the fruit, so it does not.

Where operations get this wrong is bulk. A packhouse running certified and non-certified fruit down the same line on the same day, with no segregation and no identity preservation on the paperwork, cannot show that what left the door was what it claimed to be. Input and output quantities have to reconcile, which is the mass balance exercise of a supplier audit.

What does an IFA audit actually cover on a South African farm?

The certification body audits the whole farming operation, not only food safety. GLOBALG.A.P. groups the IFA content for fruit and vegetables into ten areas: traceability, food safety, worker health, safety and welfare, biodiversity and habitats, energy efficiency, waste management, fertilisers and biostimulants, water management, integrated pest management, and plant protection products. It runs from preharvest activity through postharvest handling.

The rhythm is a three year cycle. The first certification body audit covers all requirements in the applicable checklists, years two and three cover the operational items identified in those checklists, then a full recertification audit runs against all requirements again. On top of the announced audits, a minimum of ten percent of a certification body’s certificate holders are audited unannounced across a twelve month period. The certificate is valid for twelve months and can be extended by up to four further months.

For a South African operation the audit time goes into water, plant protection products and workers: water source risk assessment and analysis results, given the state of many irrigation sources; plant protection product records showing registered use for the crop and the destination market, residue limit management, intervals, calibration and secure storage; and the worker facilities, training and health and safety records GRASP will also examine.

Food safety on the farm is not a bolt-on. The hazard thinking behind the standard is the same discipline as Introduction to HACCP, R1,195, and growers who have done hazard analysis properly move through the food safety sections of an IFA audit far more quickly. Our HACCP training guide for South Africa and the guide to choosing the right HACCP level will tell you where to start if that base is missing.

What records must a grower have before the auditor arrives?

The audit is a records audit with a farm walk attached. An auditor cannot certify a practice they cannot evidence, and in my experience the majority of non-conformances raised at a first GLOBALG.A.P. audit are record failures rather than practice failures. The farm was doing the right thing and could not prove it for the twelve months being examined.

On one first certification I worked on, the farm walk was the easy part. The spraying was disciplined and the chemical store was locked and bunded. Then we opened the file. Applications had been written on a wall planner in that store and thrown out at the end of each season, so nothing existed for the twelve months under audit except the current one. Years of correct practice were invisible on the day they had to be evidenced.

The self-assessment is not a formality, it is a requirement, and an auditor who finds an unsigned or backdated one will treat everything else in the file with more suspicion. Food defence and food fraud risk assessments are now standard content across GFSI recognised schemes, which is why growers pair their GLOBALG.A.P. work with Food Fraud (VACCP) and Food Defence (TACCP), R1,450, explained further in our VACCP and TACCP course guide.

What do Option 1 and Option 2 mean for smallholders and producer groups?

Option 1 is the individual producer, single site or multiple sites, certified in their own name without a quality management system requirement. Option 2 is the producer group, and multisite producers who choose to run a quality management system. Under Option 2 a legal entity registers on behalf of its members, operates a documented quality management system, and inspects its own members internally before any certification body arrives.

The certification body then audits differently. The GLOBALG.A.P. General Regulations Rules for Certification Bodies set out at clause 7.3 that the certification body’s quality management system audit is divided into an audit of the quality management system itself, including central product handling units where applicable, and an audit of a sample of registered producer group members, production sites and handling sites.

Option 2 is the practical route for South African smallholder and emerging farmer groups, cooperatives and enterprise development programmes attached to a commercial packhouse. It is also where certification most often fails, because the group builds a quality management system on paper and never resources the internal inspection. If nobody has been trained to audit a member farm, the certification body’s sample finds what the internal inspector should have found first.

Do South African fruit exporters need GLOBALG.A.P.?

In practice, yes, if the fruit is going to Europe or the United Kingdom. The Citrus Growers’ Association reported in May 2026 that South Africa exported 2.9 million tonnes of citrus in 2025, the largest volume of any exporter in the world, ahead of Spain, into markets including the European Union, the United States, India and China. Horticultural income here rests on certificates a European buyer will accept.

Apples, pears, stone fruit and a fast growing avocado sector sit in the same product category under the same buyer pressure, which makes the Smart versus GFS question a revenue question rather than a technical one. A grower who certifies to the wrong edition can still sell, but not into the programme they built the orchard for. Growers supplying EU and UK retail, or an exporter or packhouse certified to BRCGS, should assume the GFS edition until a buyer says otherwise in writing.

The second South African reality is the packhouse. Very few growers ship directly. Fruit passes through independent packhouses, cold stores and exporters, each a separate legal entity and therefore a separate Chain of Custody question. A grower who has done everything correctly can still have the claim collapse at the cold store, so ask every business that touches your fruit for its Chain of Custody certificate or its written reason for being outside scope. Packhouse teams building the site level basics should look at Implementation of Good Manufacturing Practices, R1,950.

Which findings stop a first GLOBALG.A.P. certification?

First audits rarely fail on the farming. They fail on the system around the farming. The pattern I see repeatedly on South African operations is the same handful of gaps, every one fixable before an auditor is booked, at a fraction of the cost of a second audit and a delayed shipping season.

Records that do not cover the full period

Spray records that begin three months before the audit date are the commonest version of this, closely followed by a single water analysis from two seasons ago and training registers with no assessment attached. The auditor is examining a production cycle, not a week.

Traceability that stops at the packhouse door

A lot number that cannot be traced back to a block and a harvest date, or forward to a dispatch document and a customer, is not traceability. Run a mock recall and keep the evidence.

Water risk assessed but not acted on

Many farms complete the risk assessment, identify a contaminated source, and then change nothing. The assessment without the control measure is a finding, not a defence.

Plant protection products used outside their registration

Product not registered for the crop, or not acceptable in the destination market, or applied without the interval being observed. This is the finding that costs consignments, not just certificates.

A self-assessment that was never done

Turning up to a certification audit without a completed self-assessment tells the auditor the system is not being run internally at all.

Producer group internal inspections that are a formality

Under Option 2, internal inspection reports that record no findings across every member are treated by an experienced auditor as evidence that the internal audit function is not working. A real audit finds something.

Corrective actions closed without a root cause

Closing a finding by repeating the correction is how the same finding returns next year. If every closure reads “operator retrained”, the cause is untouched. An Overview of Root Cause Analysis, R649 is four hours and it changes how a corrective action register reads, as our root cause analysis course guide sets out.

Frequently asked questions

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