At this high-level international conference, the partners drew together a distinguished group of public and private sector leaders to examine the past, present and future of organic market access relative to systems of organic standards and conformity assessment. Developments and challenges for dominant and emerging exporting/importing economies and for still-developing countries were highlighted and discussed. Models of public-private and regional cooperation were considered as potential pathways for global solutions to the challenges. In the early 90’s, regional organic standards were limited to the European Union. Today, regional organic standards are being forged in the Pacific island countries and territories, East Africa, Central America and Dominican Republic and South/ South-East Asia. The development of regional organic standards that are strongly based on public-private partnerships are increasingly gathering political support. These processes, which are paving the way toward a new regionalism for organic agriculture, were described in the conference. New developments in equivalence in the organic sector were also examined, including recent bilateral equivalence agreements involving Canada, the United States and the European Union. For future development of equivalence, supportive government import policies and multilateral approaches were encouraged. The conference also looked at emerging issues, such as the potential for organic standards to promote the growth of organic agriculture vis-à-vis their potential to stifle growth. The role and effectiveness of standards to improve the impacts of organic agriculture were also examined.