Uganda: Agricado Farms gains certification

Agricado Farms’ 1-year action plan leads to GLOBALG.A.P. certification

A year’s effort by the Agricado Farms team in collaboration with COLEACP’s Fit For Market programme has resulted in the company’s achievement of GLOBALG.A.P. certification (Option 1 – Single Producer Certification). Confirmed following an audit in January 2021, this certification will have a major positive effect on the company’s ability to access international high-end markets.

Agricado Farms Uganda Ltd is a new fresh fruit and vegetable company located in Kampala, Uganda. It targets the European and Middle Eastern markets for supplying hot peppers, green and red chillies, eggplants, okra, sweet potato, peanuts, avocado and macadamia nuts.

To enhance capacity building for its staff and to achieve GLOBALG.A.P. certification, Agricado Farms submitted a request for support to the Fit For Market programme. A Memorandum of Understanding, including an individual action plan, was signed with COLEACP after a meeting at Fruit Logistica (Berlin) in February 2020.

Although in March 2020 Covid-19 had a major impact on the horticultural sector in Uganda, with a lot of restrictions on local movement and even temporary closing of the airport in Kampala, Agricado Farms found solutions to reach the main goal of achieving GLOBALG.A.P. certification by the end of the year.
Fit For Market support included group training on hazard analysis and critical control points (HACCP), offering the most important building blocks to develop a food safety management and traceability system according to international standards. As a second step, COLEACP organised technical assistance with a baseline assessment to identify corrective actions to be taken in terms of documentation, procedures, infrastructure and training to reach compliance with GLOBALG.A.P. Following this needs assessment, the company’s quality management team took part in training on how to introduce the GLOBALG.A.P. standard to its workers. On top of this training, tailor-made technical assistance was offered to close the remaining gaps to meet all GLOBALG.A.P. requirements.

When all GLOBALG.A.P. requirements were in place, a final validation of the quality management system was organised in November 2020, to make sure that the certification audit would not reveal an unacceptable number non-conformities that would hinder GLOBALG.A.P. certification.

COLEACP congratulates the Agricado Farms team on this achievement, especially in the demanding context of 2020.

The Fit For Market programme is implemented by COLEACP within the Framework of Development Cooperation between the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS) and the European Union.