Therefore, there remains a need for minimum criteria to be commonly defined, endorsed and enforced. The OECD Schemes provide a legal system to control minimum standards at the international level. Its contribution to monitoring the identity and purity of seed brings additional benefits to seed producers. This allowed limited and conditional recognition of field inspection by company staff of some certified-seed crops. This experimental departure from the rules was agreed in the wake of the 1989 EC experiment.
Accreditation tends to be associated with the spreading of quality assurance systems.
The 1999 Annual Meeting of the Designated Authorities agreed on the extension of the experiment to other aspects of seed certification such as sampling, laboratory testing, and labelling. The OECD Seed Schemes must respond to the increasing demand for membership from new countries. As more countries enter international markets, the growth of the OECD Seed Schemes is inevitable. Each country confronted with different legal settings, institutional balances and market relations, must devise its own approach. At the same time, the multiplicity of approaches must remain consistent among countries entering the world trade market as importers or exporters.