Pre-shipment inspection for Brazilian agricultural commodities

The short answer

A pre-shipment inspection verifies that what is loaded matches what was ordered: the quantity, the quality against a contract spec, the packing and marking, sometimes the price and customs classification. It happens before the goods ship, at the exporter's inland terminal or at the load port. In a private commercial inspection, the buyer commissions it and the buyer usually pays for it, because the buyer is the party the check protects.

It matters most when payment runs through a letter of credit. A credit pays against documents, not against goods. The bank checks that the paperwork is complete and consistent and then releases the money, and it has no way of knowing whether the bags in the container hold the protein content the contract named or half of it. An inspection certificate, written into the credit as a required document, closes that gap: the shipment is checked by an independent party before it moves, and the certificate travels with the rest of the presentation. More on the payment side is on the letters of credit page.

What pre-shipment inspection is, and what it is not

The term has a specific legal meaning. Under the WTO Agreement on Preshipment Inspection, an inspection verifies that "the price, exchange rate, financial terms, quantity, quality and customs classification of the transaction are consistent with what was ordered", and it does so before the goods are shipped from the exporting country. That wording is quoted from the United States government trade portal's summary of Article 1.3, because the WTO's own site was not reachable for direct citation while this page was prepared, so read it as a close paraphrase rather than a verified verbatim quote.

Worth separating three things that often get merged.

A private commercial inspection is the subject of this page. The buyer, or sometimes the seller, hires an independent inspection company under contract. What gets checked is quantity, quality against the trade spec, packing, marking, sampling. The result is a commercial inspection certificate. Nothing about it is mandatory. It exists because two parties agreed to it.

Government inspection is a different animal. Customs clearance and sanitary, veterinary or phytosanitary control are state functions. In Brazil that means MAPA, the Ministry of Agriculture, for products of animal and plant origin, and the Receita Federal for customs. These checks are compulsory and are not something the buyer and seller choose or design.

Conformity certification is a third track: confirming that a product meets a standard or a technical regulation. That is not pre-shipment inspection either, and it is commissioned and issued differently.

The WTO agreement itself, worth noting, governs the government-mandated version, where an importing country's government contracts a private firm to inspect its incoming trade for customs and currency control. A commercial inspection commissioned by the buyer borrows the same subject matter, quantity and quality before shipment, but it is a private contractual service rather than a WTO regime.

Who inspects agricultural commodities in Brazil

The market for independent inspection of Brazilian grains, oilseeds, soybean meal and sugar is mature and competitive. The global names are present at the ports and have laboratories on the ground. Coverage thins out for coffee, and for meat and wet blue leather there is a real gap, which the table sets out plainly.

Company	What is confirmed for Brazilian agriculture
SGS	Agricultural commodities inspection on its Brazil site: pre-shipment inspection, quality and quantity inspection, agricultural sampling, draft survey and marine services, loading and discharge supervision, tally. Works under Gafta and FOSFA contractual terms. Runs an agri-commodity and food laboratory in Brazil accredited to ISO 17025 and AOAC International.
Cotecna	In Brazil since 1983, with its own laboratories. Branch and laboratory at the port of Rio Grande covering soybeans, corn, wheat, rice, soybean meal and sorghum, with lab analysis for oil content, protein, moisture and ash. A further laboratory in Santos. Services span cargo inspection, draft surveys, fumigation, physical and chemical testing, sampling and testing.
Control Union	Commodity inspections covering agriculture, sugar, feed, cocoa and coffee, molasses and vegetable and tropical oils. The only one of the four to name coffee directly. Offers draft survey, contractual sampling and sealing, loading and unloading supervision at the port, laboratory work and independent weighing.
Bureau Veritas	Weight and quality certification of agricultural products at port and inland terminals, across all regions of Brazil. Its global grains and oilseeds division does contractual sampling and sealing, grading under the relevant standards, weighing and tally, and loading and discharge supervision.

Two gaps are honest to state. On coffee, only Control Union names it as an inspected commodity; the other three have confirmed grain, oilseed and meal coverage, with sugar confirmed for Cotecna, but none lists coffee by name on the pages reviewed. On meat and on wet blue leather, none of the four presents a subject-specific commodity inspection page for Brazil. For meat that is less of a gap than it looks, because the main control there is a government one, covered below. Intertek's presence in Brazilian agricultural commodities was not verified, so it is left out rather than assumed.

If your first concern is the exporter itself rather than the cargo, the supplier verification page covers checking that the company is real and licensed before any inspection is booked.

Sampling standards

Quality figures are only as good as the sample they came from, and for grains, oilseeds and meal the sampling is not improvised. It runs through the contract. A Gafta or FOSFA contract points to a defined sampling method, the sample is drawn by an accredited superintendent, and the analysis follows an ISO or AOCS method.

Commodity	Standard or method	What it governs
Grains, feed, oilseeds under Gafta	Gafta No. 124 Sampling Rules	Sampling, analysis instructions and certification for goods on Gafta terms. Samples drawn by a superintendent from the Gafta Approved Register. Edition in force for contracts from 1 October 2025.
Oils, fats, oilseeds	FOSFA Contractual Methods of Sampling	Sampling of oils, fats and oilseeds by FOSFA superintendent members, with methods drawing on ISO and AOCS.
Coffee, moisture	ISO 6673:2025	Loss in mass at 105 °C, used to determine water content of green coffee.
Coffee, bean size	ISO 4150:2011	Sieve analysis of green coffee bean size, manual and machine.
Sugar, colour	ICUMSA methods	Solution colour in ICUMSA units. ICUMSA publishes methods and does not certify products.
Wet blue, chrome	ASTM D7967	Chrome content as Cr2O3 in wet blue, on a dry weight basis.
Coffee, grading	SCA Coffee Standards	Green coffee grading, sample size and defect categories.

Meat and wet blue have no single contractual sampling system on the level of Gafta or FOSFA. That absence is part of why they behave differently in the sections below.

By commodity

Coffee

At shipment, the parameters an independent check can put numbers to are moisture by ISO 6673, screen size by ISO 4150, defect count and type, and cup quality. SCA grading needs a 350 gram sample of green coffee, and specialty grade allows zero Category One defects. Alongside the international methods, Brazil has its own official classification, the COB, which scores a lot on category, group, class and type, with physical assessment on a 300 gram sample and a sensory panel of seven cups. A buyer can specify either framework, or both, in the contract.

Sugar

The number everyone quotes, ICUMSA 45, is a colour figure and nothing more. It means the white sugar has a solution colour of 45 ICUMSA units or lower. The industry itself cautions that the term is used loosely in trade and that colour alone does not describe the full quality of the sugar. Polarity and moisture belong in a full trade spec too, but reliable threshold figures for them were not confirmed from a primary source, so treat them as parameters to name in the contract rather than as numbers to copy from a web page.

Soybean meal

This is the best-covered commodity of the set. The quality parameters that matter are protein and moisture, both named directly in Cotecna's Rio Grande laboratory scope for soybean meal, alongside oil content and ash. Sampling runs through the Gafta or FOSFA contract by an accredited superintendent, and the analysis is laboratory work at the port.

Wet blue leather

Wet blue is sold worldwide by size or by weight, with the moisture it contains taken into account, and it is stored at a moisture content of around 60 percent. Chrome content, as Cr2O3, is a measured parameter under ASTM D7967, because it reflects how far the hide was tanned. Beyond that, wet blue is described commercially by thickness, area and a visual selection by defects, but there is no single contractual standard on the Gafta or FOSFA level, and specific thickness ranges or selection grades were not confirmed from a primary source. Set them out in the contract itself rather than relying on an industry shorthand.

Meat

Here the split between private and government control is the whole point. In Brazil the veterinary and sanitary control of animal products for export is a state function. The plant must hold a SIF, the federal inspection registration, and be on MAPA's list of establishments cleared to export to your destination country. Fitness for consumption, sanitary compliance and the veterinary certificate all sit with MAPA and SIF, not with a private inspector, and a buyer can check the plant's SIF number in MAPA's register directly. A private inspection in the meat chain, where it is used at all, is generally limited to commercial loading parameters such as quantity, packing, marking and container condition. What a commercial inspector actually does on Brazilian meat was not confirmed in specific terms from the inspection companies, so treat that scope as general practice, and keep it firmly separate from the government veterinary control that the export certificate represents.

Fitting the inspection into the deal

The mechanism is simple once the credit is set up right. UCP 600 has no dedicated article for an inspection certificate, so it falls under article 14(f) as an "other document", and the credit itself defines who issues it and what it has to say. Get that wording right and the certificate becomes a document the bank checks like any other in the presentation.

Timing is the reason it works. The inspection happens before shipment, and the certificate goes into the document set that the bank pays against. The credit pays against a complying presentation of documents, not against the goods themselves, so an inspection done before the goods move is the buyer's one built-in check on the cargo before the money leaves.

A certificate can also be forged, which is why verifying that a certificate is genuine is a separate step from reading what it says. SGS, Bureau Veritas, Cotecna and Intertek each run an online check, by certificate number and barcode, QR scan, or a file validator, that confirms the document is authentic. It confirms the paper, not the contents of the container. How to run those checks is covered on the securing an advance payment page.

Cost

There is no published price. None of SGS, Cotecna, Control Union or Bureau Veritas lists a rate card or a fee schedule for agricultural commodity inspection on the pages reviewed, and the model is a quote on request. Anyone quoting you a fixed figure for "a Brazil inspection" is guessing.

What the price turns on is the commodity, the volume, the location, and how much work is involved: sampling only, or full laboratory analysis; a single load point, or supervision across an inland terminal and a port; draft survey and marine services on top. In a private commercial inspection the buyer usually pays, since the buyer is the party the check protects. The exception is a government-mandated inspection program, where the importing country's government contracts the inspector and the exporter is billed directly. Those are two different arrangements and it is worth being clear which one you are in.

What to specify when you commission an inspection

Working from what is confirmed above, a usable brief names five things.

The commodity and the exact contract spec. For coffee, whether grading follows SCA, the Brazilian COB, or both, with moisture by ISO 6673 and screen size by ISO 4150. For sugar, the ICUMSA colour figure and, separately, the polarity and moisture you require, since colour alone does not cover quality. For soybean meal, protein and moisture as the lead parameters. For wet blue, whether it trades by area or by weight, the moisture basis, and chrome by ASTM D7967, with thickness and selection written into the contract because no single standard supplies them.

The sampling regime: for grains, oilseeds and meal, the Gafta or FOSFA contract terms and sampling by an accredited superintendent under Gafta 124 or the FOSFA Contractual Methods.

The point of inspection, at the inland terminal, the load port, or both. Rio Grande is one confirmed port node with an inspection laboratory on site. Port selection is its own subject, on the Incoterms and Brazilian ports page.

For meat, keep the private commercial scope separate in writing from the government veterinary control, and check the plant's SIF number and export eligibility yourself.

And the certificate wording the letter of credit requires, so it satisfies article 14(f) and passes at the bank. The Sourcing from Brazil overview ties these steps together.

Sources

• WTO Agreement on Preshipment Inspection, Article 1.3: quoted from the United States government trade portal at trade.gov, accessed 8 September 2026. The WTO's own text was not reachable for direct citation, so verify the wording against wto.org before treating it as a verbatim quote.
• Company coverage in Brazil: SGS, Cotecna, Control Union and Bureau Veritas corporate sites, agricultural and Brazil pages, accessed 8 September 2026. Coffee is named directly only by Control Union. Meat and wet blue have no subject-specific commodity inspection page among the four. Intertek's Brazilian agricultural coverage was not verified and is not asserted.
• Sampling standards: Gafta No. 124 (edition in force from 1 October 2025) and FOSFA Contractual Methods of Sampling, from the Gafta and FOSFA sites. ISO 6673:2025 and ISO 4150:2011 from iso.org. ASTM D7967 from the ASTM store. SCA Coffee Standards from the Specialty Coffee Association. Titles, subject and current edition are confirmed; the full method texts are paywalled.
• Sugar colour: ICUMSA function and the "ICUMSA 45 is colour only" caution from an industry paper by British Sugar / BSST, secondary, since ICUMSA's methods are paid. Polarity and moisture thresholds were not confirmed and no figures are given. Wet blue traded by size or weight and stored at around 60 percent moisture, from an industry reference work, secondary; chrome by ASTM D7967, primary; thickness, area and selection grades not confirmed.
• Meat as a government control: MAPA and SIF requirements from gov.br sources. The scope of a private commercial meat inspection was not confirmed and is presented as general practice.
• Inspection certificate under UCP 600 article 14(f), and authenticity checks (SGS eCERT, Bureau Veritas, Cotecna E-Dox, Intertek): carried over from the securing an advance payment page, which holds the primary citations. Authenticity checks confirm the document, not the shipment.

Facts on this page were checked on 8 September 2026. Standards, company service listings and Brazilian regulation all change. Confirm the current edition of any standard and the relevant agency requirement before relying on a figure or a track named here.