G.A.P. in action in Brazil

About the project

Countries: Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, and Peru

Period:  June 2014 – October 2015, and August 2015 – March 2016

Project partner: Citi Foundation, United Way, Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, and Arcos Dorados

Objective: The GLOBALG.A.P. Secretariat and partners aimed to build local consulting capacities to help smallholder farmers in Peru, Guatemala, Brazil, and Argentina implement responsible farming practices to access new markets and improve their livelihoods. The project also sought to increase the base of suppliers that can consistently provide safe food to retailers and the food service sector.

Approach: The project used a two-phase approach.  First, a group of local agricultural consultants were trained to become GLOBALG.A.P. licensed Farm Assurers*.  Next, these newly qualified Farm Assurers transfered their knowledge to a broad group of producers and smallholders through a diverse range of training events and activities. To support their on-field work, the partners developed educational G.A.P. in Action posters with basic implementation instructions covering the Integrated Farm Assurance (IFA) standard and GLOBALG.A.P. Risk Assessment on Social Practice (GRASP) add-on.

SDGs addressed: #17 Partnerships for the goals

Outcome: In total, 135 consultants across the four countries were trained and in turn, during a one-day training session, they trained more than 2,000 farmers on responsible farming practices.

The G.A.P. in Action posters also provided useful tools that break down the complex requirements of IFA and GRASP into basic implementation instructions to facilitate implementation. As the posters are very much in demand, they were translated into more languages and updated for IFA v6. The languages included Spanish, Arabic, Bengali, Bosnian, Chinese, Hindi, Latvian, Romanian, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian and Serbian. An instructional video based on the G.A.P. in Action poster on integrated pest management was also developed in another project.

*The GLOBALG.A.P. Farm Assurer program was succeeded by the Registered Trainer program in 2022.