Background

Rikolto is an international NGO with over 50 years of experience partnering with farmer organisations and food chain actors in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. Rikolto runs programmes in 18 countries worldwide through 5 regional offices. Rikolto envisions a world with production and consumption systems that allow poverty and hunger to be eradicated and that do not burden our planet more than it can bear. Rikolto has been coaching farmers to change their practices in line with low-carbon and sustainable rice production practices, including Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD), following the Sustainable Rice Production (SRP) Standard, and promoting market linkages by connecting rice producers with market actors.

The Sustainable Rice Platform (SRP) Standard for Sustainable Rice Cultivation is the world’s first voluntary sustainability standard for rice. The SRP Standard is a stable practice which could generate higher income for farmers and a friendly environment by reducing the application of fertilizer and pesticides, henceforth generate fewer negative impacts on the environment, reducing risks, and being suitable for most farmers in MKD.

Since 2018, farmers in Dong Thap province have been implementing and gaining experience with the model supported by Rikolto. Rikolto is now planning to support SRP (Sustainable Rice Platform) certification for two cooperatives and is currently seeking consulting services to assist farmer organisations in implementing SRP verification.

Key Objectives

The main objective of the consulting package is to support Dong Thap rice farmer organisations on SRP standard verification. The following specific objectives are:

1. The farmer organisations and the third-party service provider offering rice milling, packaging, and storage services possess the knowledge and skills necessary to operate under the SRP Verification Scheme.
2. Support the farmer organisations and the third-party service provider in obtaining SRP verification from a Verification Body, covering their raw material areas and associated products.

Scope of work

Location: Dong Thap Province (including two rice farmer cooperatives with a raw material cultivation area of approximately 200 hectares, one rice mill owned by a cooperative, and a third-party service provider offering rice milling, packaging, and storage services).

The scope of work includes, but is not limited to, the following tasks (see details in the table in the next chapter):

• Training for farmers and cooperatives on SRP standards requirements, SRPIMS and self-assessment for SRP standard;
• Support cooperatives and miller to review and establish internal management system (IMS); develop documents and train related skills to operate self-assessment;
• Provide training to the rice miller on SRP custody of chains (CoC);develop documents and train related skills to operate the internal management system;
• Assist in documents for factory form, procedures, production, processing, storage, farm plans and regulations related to SRP verification requirements;
• Provide specific guidance on compliance practices on farms, processing and storage facilities;
• Guidance on registration procedures with verification bodies (VBs);
• Support during verification audit and following up and instruction for corrective action(s) (if any).

Schedule: The consultant is expected to complete the tasks within a total of estimated 114 working days.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of experience on consultations of different strict world standards in the field of agriculture (e.g. Global GAP, Organic), food safety (ISO 22000, FSSC 22000,BRC), and other sustainable programs;
• Familiar with the SRP tools (Standard, Performance Indicators, IMS, Assurance Scheme, CoC)
• Having successfully consulted (verified) for at least 01 SRP verification case;
• Having SRP Authorized trainer;
• SRP Authorized training provider will be an advance.

For more information, please refer to the Job Description.

How to apply

Applications (company profile, lead consultant CVs, cover letter and a detailed budget plan and implementation roadmap) should be emailed before June 20, 2025 to: [email protected]

Only qualified candidates (firms) will be invited for an interview.