Accreditation and Certification Bodies

The roles are easily confused, and the vocabulary invites it. A certification body issues certificates to organisations — a farm, a processor, a trader. An accreditation body issues no certificates to producers at all; it accredits certification bodies, and its customers are those bodies rather than the farms they audit. Accreditation bodies are typically national, and a country usually has one recognised for a given field, which is why accreditation is a thinner and more institutional layer than certification.

Scheme owner

Writes the standard and the scheme rules. May approve certification bodies to operate the scheme, but generally does not audit producers itself.

Certification body

Audits producers or organisations against the standard and takes certification decisions. Paid by the certified party — hence the impartiality problem.

Accreditation body

Assesses whether a certification body is competent, impartial, and operating correctly, against the applicable international standard. Independent of the producers entirely.

Competent authority

Where a claim is regulated, the public body that approves and supervises control bodies. It occupies the accreditation position, or works alongside it.

The international standards governing certification bodies devote substantial attention to impartiality, and the reason is the commercial relationship at the heart of the model. A certification body that consults for an organisation and then certifies it is marking its own homework. One whose revenue depends heavily on a single client has an obvious exposure. One whose auditors are rewarded for throughput rather than accuracy has a subtler one. These pressures are structural, they are known, and the standards require bodies to identify and manage them rather than to claim they do not exist.

Accreditation is the external check on whether that management is real. An accreditation body assesses the certification body’s procedures, competence, decision-making, and independence, and witnesses audits in the field. The candid way to describe the result is that accreditation makes the conflict manageable rather than absent — it does not abolish the fact that the auditor is paid by the audited, and no assurance model in commercial use has solved that problem outright.

Accreditation is national, but trade is not. A buyer in one country receiving a certificate issued by a body accredited in another has no direct way to evaluate that foreign accreditation body. The answer is multilateral arrangements among accreditation bodies, through which signatories evaluate one another and agree to recognise each other’s accreditations — so that an accreditation in one signatory country is accepted in the others.

This is what makes the phrase "accepted once, accepted everywhere" more than an aspiration, and it connects directly to the WTO TBT Agreement’s encouragement of recognition of other members’ conformity assessment results. Without such arrangements, every export would face re-testing and re-certification at destination — a barrier as effective as a tariff and considerably harder to negotiate away.

• Not a guarantee of any certificate — it assesses the body, not each certification decision
• Not a product or safety claim — it says nothing about any farm, product, or consignment
• Not a global authority — accreditation is national, extended across borders by agreement
• Not applicable to every scheme — some schemes approve certifiers themselves, without third-party accreditation
• Not a solution to the conflict of interest — it manages a structural problem it cannot remove

The first point is the one worth holding. An accreditation body assesses a certification body periodically, examining procedures and sampling its work. It does not review every audit or ratify any individual certificate. A certificate from an accredited body was issued by an organisation assessed as competent — which is a meaningful thing to know and is not the same as a warranty that this particular certificate was correctly issued.