The Consumer Goods Forum’s Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) is opening a new stakeholder consultation today under the Technical Equivalence Program for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Marketing Service (USDA AMS) Harmonized GAP Plus+ version 4.0, issued on July 1, 2022. The deadline for consultation responses is March 16, 2024.
The Technical Equivalence program is designed to benchmark government-owned standards against Part III of GFSI Benchmarking Requirements. Where those requirements are fulfilled, the relevant standard is granted Technical Equivalence to acknowledge alignment of the given standard’s content to the relevant scope(s) of the GFSI Benchmarking Requirements, Part III. Unlike GFSI recognition, Technical Equivalence does not include the assessment of the program’s governance or protocols for operational delivery.