The established system of accredited Halal certification is the basis for the development of the Halal sector in Kazakhstan

How often do you hear the word Halal or see a sign حلال  at the counters of shops or in public catering outlets ? Are you familiar with this term?

Halal is a system of values for more than one and a half billion people, adherents of Islam, one of the dynamically developing religions. Literally, from Arabic, Halal means "permissible" and regulates almost all spheres of Muslim life, from food consumed, services, and ending with interpersonal relationships. It should be noted that from the standpoint of the Canons of Islam, everything is allowed to be eaten that is not indicated as forbidden in the Koran, the holy book for Muslims. The proof of which is the following lines of the Koran: "Say (O, Missionary): "From what is given to me in revelation, I do not find it forbidden for the eater to eat any kind of food, unless it is dead meat [carrion]; or blood shed [during slaughter]; or meat pigs are filth; or slaughtered not in the name of Allah"" Surah "Cattle", ayat 145.

This is not the only reference to what is permitted and forbidden in the Koran. There are about a dozen ayats in the Muslim holy Book regarding food and alcohol. But as we can see from the text of the verses, only a certain range of prohibited products is stipulated. And even in this case, if there are no direct or indirect signs of the forbidden, then in everyday life the product is considered permissible by default. However, this does not remove the obligation of every believer to check the product for the presence of forbidden things before using it. But how does an ordinary consumer have so much knowledge and competence to determine its Halal status with a cursory glance at the product? If earlier there were no problems with this due to the localization of producers in the domestic market, and the issues of Halal status were not raised according to the adat (customary law of Muslims), then with the influence of globalization, the openness of the world market and the development of conservation technology in the food and chemical industry, it became almost impossible to follow trends. In order for customers to consume products without fear of inadvertently violating the Canons of Islam, the sphere of accredited Halal certification has been actively developing throughout the Muslim world in recent decades. The impetus for the development of the sphere was the appearance and widespread distribution of products containing ingredients forbidden to Muslims, derived from pork, dead meat, animal blood, GMOs, or carcinogenic substances and alcohol, as well as preservatives, food additives, enzymes and microorganisms of non-Halal origin.

Thus, in contrast to the traditional understanding, at present, it is recognized that Halal is a complex structure of the supply chain and production, which can be characterized by the following thesis expression: "Accredited Halal certification is an integral quality system, at all stages of which every aspect of the production cycle and further promotion of Halal products is checked " from the field to forks"". The participation of manufacturers and distributors of Halal products and services in international trade creates prerequisites for their passage of accredited Halal certification, which, in turn, makes Halal certification the norm rather than the exception. After all, only accredited Halal certification, due to its specificity, is able to ensure the trust of Muslim consumers and prevent any misunderstandings regarding the Halal status of a product or service.

So what is accredited Halal certification?

Accreditation is the official recognition of an independent person (Accreditation Body) that another person (Certification Body) is competent to perform work within the declared field of activity. The word "accredo" is translated from Latin as "Trust". In other words, the Accreditation Body (object) issues a credit of trust, confirming the readiness to work to a trustworthy Certification Body (subject) to assess the compliance of the manufacturer (applicant) with the established requirements of the standard(s). This is how, in general terms, the conformity assessment system looks like: accreditation – certification and testing – product.

The correct approach to building any accredited certification system, including Halal, should begin with the development and adoption of standards necessary for the operation of this very system. Only if all the necessary standards are available, a full-fledged system is built. The standards themselves are divided into levels/categories. So, some standards set the requirements for the accreditation procedure. Others refer to the test procedure, and others to the certification procedure, including: certification of production processes and services, quality management and personnel competence, premises, storage, distribution, etc.

What are the advantages of accredited Halal certification?

Accreditation increases the credibility of certification Bodies. In turn, the Certification Bodies transmit the high requirements of the standard(s) they follow to the manufacturers of Halal products. Manufacturers, through certification, provide consumers with products positioned as environmentally friendly, produced in compliance with the norms of Islam, and are of high quality. Consequently, the positive effect of accredited Halal certification extends to the end user. Along with this, it gives manufacturers a decisive advantage and an opportunity to get ahead in the competition in the fast-growing global market of the Halal industry.

According to experts, the production volume of the global Halal industry market is estimated at 2 trillion US dollars per year. At the same time, more than 20% of the earth's inhabitants are Muslims, and Islam is the official religion in more than 30 countries of the world. Together, these indicators give the Halal industry market a growth rate of about 5.2% per year. By 2030, the Muslim population is projected to grow to 2.3 billion people in Muslim-majority countries alone. Add to this the progressive purchasing power of Muslims themselves and the growing number of Muslims in traditionally non–Muslim countries, as well as the growing interest in Halal products of non-Muslim consumers who support healthy lifestyle. Meanwhile, the activity of accredited Halal certification continues to develop, covering not only food, beverages or services, but also cosmetics, personal hygiene items, pharmaceuticals and other consumer goods. Thus, it is predicted that in the foreseeable future, the production volume of the global Halal industry market will amount to about 3 trillion US dollars.

To the origins of Halal certification in Kazakhstan.

In Kazakhstan, the word Halal began to come into use in the late nineties – early noughties, and was associated with meat and meat products (Of course, Kazakhstanis were familiar with the norms of Islam earlier, before the 1917 revolution and in the first decades of Soviet power, but that's not about it now). As a rule, it meant either the absence of pork in sausage products, or the slaughter of animals allowed for consumption by Muslims according to the requirements of Sharia. A little later, consumers began to pay attention to the absence of lard in beef and lamb minced meat. Trusting the assurances of sellers of private shops and retailers of large chains about the Halal status of their products, consumers bought these products. Nevertheless, the lack of consistency in this area has prompted enterprising people to provide food industry enterprises with services for "Halal certification" of their products. It would seem that a quality control system for Halal products and services has begun to be built. How much and in what direction has the situation in this area changed as of today?

To begin with, in 2005, the first "companies conducting Halal certification" began to appear on the domestic market. In the same year 2005, the first national standard ST RK 1353-2005 "Boiled sausages "Halal" was adopted. General technical conditions". "Certified" products began to appear on the shelves, with the label «حلال». The new label could not but attract the attention of the curious eyes of buyers, and there was no limit to the joy of practicing Muslims, since the "novelty" saved time searching for products satisfying their religious beliefs. This, in turn, for some period strengthened the confidence of Kazakh Muslims in the producers of Halal products. However, after the repeated appearance in the media of information about the discovery of pig DNA and other prohibited ingredients in the sausage products of some manufacturers, prudent consumers doubted the so-called "Halal" products. Such incidents led to the fact that even conscientious manufacturers of Halal products began to lose their reputation. It remains unknown whether the above or some international standard of "certification companies" was used when evaluating the enterprise, since these standards were not publicly available on the resources of these "companies". In turn, this is already a violation of the requirements for the availability of information about certification procedures and criteria. It is also unknown whether the manufacturers themselves were familiar with the requirements of the standard. After all, if the responsible personnel of the enterprise are not familiar with the requirements that they must follow, then it turns out that "companies" have de facto carried out and continue to carry out work on evaluating their own activities, which can sometimes be incompetent, and auditors, in case of their low qualifications, most likely conduct a formal audit. If manufacturers have access to all Halal standards for which they are certified, then, consequently, they will be able to bring their production in line with the requirements of the standard. In this case, the work of the "certification company" will be reduced to confirming compliance or non-compliance.

The issue of accreditation of these "companies" remains open. According to representatives of some of them, they are accredited by the Malaysian Accreditation Body and work according to their standards. However, it is also not possible to confirm or refute this information. In addition, the system of accredited Halal certification of Malaysia was caught in a number of violations, such as corruption and a low level of professionalism of auditors, non-compliance with Halal requirements by manufacturers, etc., there by compromised itself in the eyes of the international Muslim community, since it does not properly conduct an open investigation of these abuses.

Similar violations are recorded in the domestic market of "Halal certification". For example, non–compliance with the quorum of the audit group, when instead of the required three experts, one universal expert goes to the evaluation, or when a person far from the field of technical regulation is involved in the composition of the appraisers. Another example, due to the lack of the same competent personnel, "companies" carry out "certification" retroactively, and sometimes a document on the "certification" of an enterprise is issued without an audit, because they physically do not have time to conduct an audit. The same problem affects the quality control and "re-certification" of the enterprise, since the total number of audit groups of these "companies" de jure serve more than 1300 enterprises, of which more than 150 are agricultural. On average, it turns out, from 65 to 100 enterprises per unit of the audit group, which exceeds the average number of evaluations conducted by one audit group of an accredited certification body by 3-4 times.

Also, as a result of the shortage of personnel in the "companies", auditors evaluate only the production itself and the composition of the final product. At the same time, the issues of storage, transportation, labeling, demonstration, distribution and, as a consequence, contamination (contamination of Halal products by contact or mixing with non-Halal products and their packaging) are ignored by both the "companies" themselves and their experts conducting the audit. Another example relates to the implementation of the standard, when food standards are used when certifying a non-food industry organization, due to the fact that the necessary standard is not in the hands of the "company" or the auditor is not trained according to this standard. As a result, the products of the vast majority of enterprises that have passed Halal certification in domestic "companies" do not stand up to the Halal compliance test conducted in international laboratories, and the certificates of these "companies" themselves are not recognized by foreign authorized organizations. Only a small number of enterprises have Halal certificates recognized by the international community, which allows them to export their products. Most likely, the assessment of these companies was carried out by a foreign certification body.

You can endlessly list various kinds of violations, but, in fact, they all boil down to three key problems: 1) lack of openness; 2) low level of qualifications of auditors; 3) ignorance of the Halal requirement by manufacturers. Thus, summing up the above, it can be stated with confidence that the activity of "Halal certification" in Kazakhstan has actually been reduced to stamping "Halal certificates", and the use of the Halal sign has converged only on marketing and branding. No matter how high the quantitative indicators are, there has been no qualitative change in the country's Halal industry over the past 17 years.

From quantity to quality.

Does our country have the possibility of qualitative growth in the sphere of Halal production? Can we improve the quality of Kazakh Halal products to the level of international requirements? Are we able to increase the volume of production, thereby ensuring the domestic market and increasing the export potential? What role is assigned to our Republic in the global Halal industry market? These, and not only, issues concern the minds of domestic producers, exporters, government agencies, and ordinary citizens. The latter are concerned about this (I apologize for the tautology) not least. Since some of them are interested in the quality of the products they consume, and the income of the other part directly depends on the margin from the sale of manufactured products to the enterprise where they work. After all, in the case of the sale of "our" products in the countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (and this is no less than 57 states), and in a situation when the certificates of the Kazakh Halal certification bodies are recognized, the added value of these very products can grow significantly, and the geography of sales go beyond the Customs Union. Even such originally non-Muslim countries as Brazil, Argentina, Australia and India export Halal meat of animals and birds to the OIC countries for a total of more than 50 billion US dollars per year. Russia and Belarus are also increasing the expansion of their meat products to the Middle East and Central Asia. It should be noted that in Russia and the Baltic countries, which, by the way, have also set their sights in this direction, the issues of promoting Halal products to the markets of Muslim countries are resolved privately, through the accreditation of local certification bodies in foreign Halal accreditation bodies.

Definitely, Kazakhstan has a huge potential for the development of high-quality Halal production, thereby covering the needs of the domestic market and meeting the demand of the most demanding consumers from foreign countries. In the right hands, the sphere of Halal production can become a stimulus for the development and even a driver of the domestic food industry. To do this, the country needs a well-developed policy and a finely tuned strategy, and in order to avoid possible mistakes and risks, rely on the experience of other countries, which, to one degree or another, "painfully" passed all the stages of forming a system of accredited Halal certification from quantity to quality. But what remains unconditional is that the activities of Halal certification bodies should be open and transparent, for which state control should be established.

What prevents us from building the right system?

The introduction of new accreditation schemes is a rather time–consuming and energy-consuming procedure. First of all, it is necessary to make changes to the current legislation and regulatory legal acts (not forgetting the legal conflicts and bureaucracy encountered when making proposals), develop new or nationalize international standards, recruit and train the necessary pool of expert auditors, as well as conduct an internship for them, and finally, certify them.

One of the problems of the initiative development and implementation of new accredited certification schemes in the Republic by national institutions is that many of the developed regulatory legal acts are «apriori» aimed at studying and adopting foreign experience. In other words, the country lives in anticipation of the emergence of a new direction somewhere abroad, and only after that begins the process of studying (in particular its relevance for Kazakhstan), the introduction and development of the national standard.

A number of other problems should include the lack of training centers in the country capable of conducting training, trainings and master classes in new areas, due to the fact that there are no initiatives to introduce their own know-how schemes, as well as the high cost of introducing new international accreditation schemes. The reason? The reason lies in banal arithmetic: the time frame by which the training centers will be able to recapture their investments is too large, and the risks associated with the lack of interest of the parties are too high. In this matter, the country has found itself in a situation where the lower classes do not want to, and the upper classes cannot. They cannot understand that the issue of training specialists for the implementation of new accreditation schemes cannot be left to private training centers. We need an institutional body with an independent budget, staffed with professionals (with a capital letter) in the field of not only technical regulation, but also in all areas of the economy. Of course, in order not to inflate the staff of such a body, it is possible to announce competitions and offer grants for the development of promising areas.

The same applies to the Halal accreditation scheme, about the problems of implementation of which we are trying to convey to the reader in this article. In fairness, it should be noted that the accreditation of the Halal sphere in Kazakhstan was already discussed in the early 2000s. Ideologically minded people, determined to develop a new direction for the world community at that time, faced a wall of misunderstanding and bureaucracy in the process of promoting this accreditation scheme: when discussing the need to develop standards, amendments and additions to legislation and regulatory legal acts. According to experts in the field of technical regulation, so far there have been several attempts to launch a direction for assessing the conformity of Halal products and services in Kazakhstan. But all attempts were in vain. Thus, the palm of the development of this direction was intercepted by countries with a Muslim majority, such as Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, and a number of Persian Gulf countries. Thus, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has created a division for the development of Halal standardization at the Institute of Standardization and Metrology of Islamic Countries. The main tasks of the Institute were the issues of studying the sphere, developing and adopting standards, training personnel, training enterprises, eliminating technical barriers to trade, popularizing the standard among the OIC member countries. By the way, Kazakhstan has been a member of this authoritative, the second largest organization in the world after the UN since 1995. But, despite the long history of the existence of the OIC, the first standards of its institutional body appeared only in 2011. Kazakhstan's initiative to introduce Halal standards was more than ten years ahead. However, alas and ah! But, as they say, history does not tolerate the subjunctive mood. We can only learn a lesson from this case in order to continue to be one step ahead of the whole planet.

The road of a thousand miles begins with the first step.

Above, we tried to describe the current situation and problems associated with accredited Halal certification, both in the world and in our country, as briefly as possible. However, the reader has a reasonable question: what is being done to solve these problems by government agencies? Let's make a reservation right away that we cannot speak for all state bodies responsible for the Halal sphere. However, we will try to answer for our front of work. So:

In 2017, a Memorandum of Understanding and Cooperation was signed between the National Accreditation Center of Kazakhstan and the Gulf Accreditation Center (GAC);

In 2018, the question was raised about the need to build its own national Halal system with state control over the activities of "certification companies", with their further registration in the Register as Halal Certification Bodies and Halal Testing Laboratories;

In the same year 2018, the Republic of Kazakhstan, represented by the RSE "Kazakhstan Institute of Standardization and Metrology", was recognized as a full member of the Institute of Standardization and Metrology of Islamic Countries (SMIIC);

In 2019, a final decision was made on the development of the sphere of accredited Halal certification with the allocation of budgetary funds for:

- training of specialists of the accreditation body;

- conducting an analytical review of the experience of countries that have implemented the Halal system in order to adapt a specific standard(s);

- Nationalization and adoption of Halal standard(s).

Based on the results of the work carried out in the same year:

• The development of the regulatory framework has begun;
• A Memorandum of Understanding and cooperation was signed between the National Accreditation Center of Kazakhstan and the Emirates National Accreditation System (ENAS);
• RSE "Kazakhstan Institute of Standardization and Metrology" signed an agreement with the Institute of Standardization and Metrology of the Emirates (ESMA);
• Kazakhstan has signed an intention to cooperate with the Persian Gulf Standardization Authority (GSO);

In 2020, the National Accreditation Center of Kazakhstan became a full member of the International Halal Accreditation Forum (IHAF);

In July 2020, five Halal standards were put into effect. Thus, today there are 7 state Halal standards in the country, including for products – 3, for services – 2, for labeling – 1 and for conformity assessment – 1. Some of these standards require revision/updating;

In August 2021, new requirements for expert auditors carrying out work on conformity assessment of products came into force. According to the requirements, all experts involved in audit and certification activities will have to confirm their competence and qualifications. According to the test results, it is assumed that some auditors will stop participating in the assessments.

As of today, NCA specialists have been trained and interned at a foreign Halal accreditation body, the first audit experts have been certified to confirm the conformity of Halal products, and the process of accreditation of potential Halal OPS has been developed;

Currently, work is underway on the national adaptation of 8 standards, including two standards for accreditation of certification bodies. These regulatory documents are based on SMIIC and UAE.S/GSO standards. This will facilitate the access of Kazakh Halal products to the markets of the OIC countries;

As part of the popularization and implementation of the accredited Halal certification system, as well as the development of human resources, explanatory work is being carried out with students and teachers of universities, food industry enterprises, educational centers. Along with this, technical experts are trained.

By competently building a system of accredited Halal certification in the Republic of Kazakhstan, we will be able to achieve the following goals:

1. Develop a unified approach to the accreditation of Halal certification bodies;
2. Implement a holistic Halal certification system;
3. Bring the production and sale of Halal products in line with international requirements;
4. To restore the trust of domestic consumers in Halal products;
5. To increase the volume of exported Halal products to the markets of foreign countries.

 

Author of the article: Sharshamasov Nurmat Talgatovich. Leading specialist of the NCA