FinD Out About GlobaL G.A.P. BananaS

Let´s us find out what a Global G.A.P. certified banana means.

A worldwide leading certification for a sustainable crop production.

You probably visit the supermarket once, twice or even more times per week. There you carefully select products to put in your shopping basket. And, in the process of selecting them, you may also give attention to the external appearance of fruits and vegetables, their calorie content, and … their origin? And what about how that product reached the supermarket shelf? Do you pay attention to this detail?.

For some years, supermarkets realized quite a few customers were concerned by food safely and quality. The many questions that came up in this relation prompted a great deal of interest in supermarket chains. But, how could they meet these new requirements? Was it feasible to guarantee a supply that satisfies them?.

If you represent the whole supply chain, you can decide what to do in each phase but, if you are not at the same time the grower and the distributor, how can you ensure that the rest is done in a proper way? To guarantee that Good Agricultural Practices are carried out worldwide, supermarkets, spearheaded by a group of European chains, created a food certification in the late 1990s. Its spirit has evolved over time and continues to do so. Nowadays it is an international voluntary standard to implement good agricultural practices by all parties involved.

G.A.P. stands for Good Agricultural Practices.

So, if you buy bananas from companies that have joined the Global GAP initiative, it means that they have been produced according to the Global G.A.P. Standard. This implies that its farmer has established sustainable field practices and adequate safety conditions for working.

Imagine that you are a farmer facing the demands of supermarkets from Toulouse to Stockholm for more safety and quality controls. How could you best satisfy them by avoiding to undergo several audits against different criteria every year?. You can do it by getting a harmonized certification: the Global G.A.P. certification.

The objectives and principles of the Global G.A.P. certification follow a holistic approach. By implementing such a management system, banana farms establish more than 200 control points covering:

Environmental impact of the process (for example, water management).

Food safety (like the fertilizers applied and their control).

Worker’s occupational health and safety (like monitoring that safe working procedures are being followed).

The traceability of the fruit (to identify, for instance, harvest and post-harvest product handling activities).

In a nutshell, the GLOBAL G.A.P. Standard is a B2B certificate and you won´t find a GAP sticker on your bananas. Therefore, to know if a supermarket has joined the Global G.A.P. initiative click here:  Database Global GAP Participants.