Digitising Interstate Plant Health Assurance Certificates

  • Digitising Interstate Plant Health Assurance Certificates image

Plant Health Australia (PHA) recently commenced a project in collaboration with South Australia’s Department of Primary Industries and Regions (PIRSA) to continue the rollout of electronic Plant Health Assurance Certificates (ePHAC) supporting the Interstate Certification Assurance (ICA) scheme.

Widely used by growers around the country, the ICA scheme is a nationally endorsed program providing a means for commercial growers to self-certify that their produce meets interstate plant health market access requirements. Once accredited through regular audit, businesses can issue their own Plant Health Assurance Certificates to accompany plant goods during transit.

Compared to government certification of consignments, the ICA scheme provides a more cost effective and timely manner for certifying produce, however a current shortfall in the program is that PHACs are still paper based. Not only does this take more time for certificate completion, but limits the broader utility of the data generated, and risks errors which may hold up stock movements.

Building on the previously developed digital solution to facilitate the issuing of PHACs, PHA will manage the rollout of this tool to ensure it meets the expectations of contemporary digital systems and the needs of both government and industry.

“ePHAC will save commercial growers time and money and offers a more streamlined and effective approach to issuing PHAC’s,” said Chris O’Connor, PHA’s ePHAC Manager.

“This will generate efficiencies which can be realised across the supply chain as well as maintaining critical domestic biosecurity safeguards.”

The project is funded by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Forestry’s Building Resilience to Manage Fruit Fly funding package and contributions from PIRSA.