This document sets out international requirements for organic certification bodies (IROCB). These requirements are intended to represent a consensus on good practices in organic conformity assessment among private and public institutions. They aim to provide a baseline for assessing the equivalence of services performed by various certification bodies outside a specific organic system. The IROCB would thus serve as a tool for enabling recognition of those certification bodies’ services in international trade by other certification bodies and systems, so that governments or accreditation/approval bodies could approve each other’s requirements as equivalent in order to allow products certified to enter the system.

Application of these requirements is intended to ensure that certification bodies provide third party certification of organic operators in a consistent and reliable manner. If an evaluation reveals that a certification body is performing organic certification in line with these requirements it should be considered competent to conduct organic certification.