6.6. Group certification

The ability to provide third-party auditing and certification through an effective and justifiable biosecurity plan, when applied at the farm or compartment level, can allow farmers to access markets that require disease-status assurances that may not be available on a national level. This allows trade from a suitably certified AMA, even where a region or country is not certified free from a disease and cannot provide relevant disease-status guarantees.

If the environmental or social indicator threshold was breached, there would be need for measures to reduce the impact. For instance, these could include improved feeding strategies to reduce FCR, longer fallowing periods, synchronization of grow-out calendars to minimize excessive biomass at any one time, and other measures. If these fail to reduce the impact to the acceptable level, a drastic step may be needed, including reductions in the total production or maximum standing biomass levels within the AMA.