Today, EurepGAP confirmed the appointment of Dr Johannes Kern as the Observer for Africa in the EurepGAP Sector Committees for an initial period until Dec 2008. The role is intended to provide technical support to EurepGAP members in developing countries and to act as a smallholder ambassador identifying ways that can further facilitate the compliance of smallholder farmers with EurepGAP standards.

Nigel Garbutt, Chairman EurepGAP said “ We are delighted that in collaboration with DFID and GTZ we have been able to appoint Dr Kern who has many years of experience working with standards implementation in Developing Countries. Dr Kern will operate in a largely independent capacity linking with key stakeholders and contributing to the standard setting process. Dr Kern will be involved in establishing new frameworks for best practice in smallholder certification making the system more cost effective by developing the group certification model as well as harmonising the approaches in Africa with smallholder schemes operating in Latin America and Asia.”
 
The work of the Africa observer will be presented on an independent website www.africa-observer.info. Dr Kern can be contacted at johannes.kern@africa-observer.info His office can be reached through info@africa-observer.info


About DFID

The Department for International Development (DFID) is the part of the UK Government that manages Britain's aid to poor countries and works to get rid of extreme poverty http://www.dfid.gov.uk/.

About GTZ

The GTZ is an international cooperation enterprise for sustainable development with worldwide operations and whose main client is the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). See corporate profile on http://www.gtz.de/en/unternehmen/1698.htm