By Mehmet Enes Beşer
On 18 October 2026, Indonesia will extend mandatory halal certification to imported food and drink, cosmetics, supplements, chemical products and several other categories. The deadline will turn BPJPH’s recognition of foreign certifiers from a specialist concern into a market-access question for exporters. At the same time, Malaysia’s Halal Industry Master Plan 2030 explicitly seeks global leadership, while Türkiye’s Halal Accreditation Agency promotes an OIC/SMIIC-based accreditation system. Each country wants its halal infrastructure to travel. Unless the three systems become interoperable, leadership will mean three increasingly expensive rulebooks.
Türkiye, Malaysia, and Indonesia need to stop competing to have their logos become the worldwide standard. Instead, they should set up a scope of equivalence where the laboratories, the accrediting authorities, and the certifying parties trust each other’s activities. Otherwise, an exporter could meet the standards in one country and then pay for a whole new certification procedure in another country.
The fragmentation is institutional, not merely theological. Indonesia is building a mandatory, state-administered regime and says it has concluded mutual-recognition arrangements with more than 114 foreign halal bodies. Malaysia requires imported goods described as halal to be certified by a foreign body recognised by JAKIM. Its list effective from 30 January 2026 contains 94 bodies or authorities in 47 countries, including BPJPH and two Turkish certifiers. Türkiye, meanwhile, makes HAK the sole national authority for accrediting halal conformity-assessment bodies and bases that work on OIC/SMIIC standards.
These routes overlap, but they are not one passport. JAKIM recognition follows Malaysian procedures and its own list. Indonesia’s acceptance follows BPJPH agreements and the legal requirements of its mandatory system. A certificate backed by Türkiye’s accreditation architecture may still need destination-specific recognition before it opens either Southeast Asian market. The producer is then forced to choose a certifier according to where the goods may eventually be sold, often before a distributor or final market has been secured.
Big multinationals can handle this. They can keep their separate regulatory divisions, engage several auditors in one factory and modify packaging according to each destination country. However, a small manufacturer of food products, cosmetic products or ingredients cannot allocate such fixed costs over the whole portfolio. It may stay in one market, export through the middleman or give up trying. The consequence is counterproductive: national frameworks which are supposed to serve as a motor for halal trade can end up concentrating this trade among companies which can afford duplications.
Leadership contest can also transform certification into protectionism in disguise. There is a legitimate reason for governments to protect their Muslim consumers, and the recognition process cannot be automatic. However, when all authorities want to duplicate work done by a competent body, this additional procedure must have an obvious rationale. Otherwise, national discretion is used as an indirect market barrier, especially when domestic manufacturers have an easier path compared to foreign SMEs.
Uniformity cannot be achieved either politically or practically. The countries may have different views concerning slaughter procedure, stunning animals, trace ingredients, medications, or specific processing agents. A supranational logo will become a source of a political fight for religious authority. The practical aim is more limited: to find the requirements which are actually equivalent, to specify the differences and stop redundant testing.
SMIIC already describes harmonization and mutual recognition as central to removing technical barriers among Islamic countries. BPJPH and JAKIM also signed a bilateral cooperation agreement in 2023 covering conformity assessment, accreditation, standards and mutual recognition. Türkiye should help turn those separate pieces into a three-country Halal Equivalence Protocol rather than propose another declaration about becoming a global hub.
This protocol would start with the processing category where the quantities involved have commercial relevance, and the technical issues manageable. BPJPH, JAKIM and HAK would reconcile their respective standards and auditing criteria, create a joint dossier of ingredient declarations, factory audit requirements, certification body accreditation and laboratory testing data. National regulators would keep any additional requirements, but they would be known in advance before shipment rather than discovered upon product registration.
Trust building should happen in laboratories. Selected laboratories in all three countries should conduct blind tests for porcine materials, alcohol and any other agreed markers, compare the methodologies used and research the reasons for discrepant results. A laboratory successfully passing proficiency testing and staying within agreed accreditation boundaries would have its test result accepted for pilot products. It would not make an inspector obliged to allow an unsafe product. Repeating the same competent test does not create any religiously acceptable certainty.
Trust has to remain conditional. The national authorities have to set up a joint alert mechanism about recalls, suspended certifiers, changed manufacturing facilities and falsified documents. Acceptance criteria will be product-specific and expire until surveillance audits are conducted. The failure of one factory should start an auditable correction process rather than bring down recognition of all exporters from this country. Trust can endure mistakes only when the response is defined before making them.
This commercial acceptance protocol would be tough. Over twelve months BPJPH, JAKIM and HAK will publish how many duplicate audits were eliminated, what the average time and cost of approvals was and the number of SMEs gaining orders in the second market. Certificates issued and participation in the conference would not provide much information. If a Turkish manufacturer still has to undergo three substantial audits in one and the same factory, the system has broken irrespective of signed memorandums.
Indonesia’s October deadline gives the project urgency. Malaysia has spent decades building a globally marketed national halal brand, and Türkiye hosts SMIIC, the institution intended to develop common OIC standards. Those advantages should be combined rather than defended as competing claims to leadership. The country that leads the halal economy will not be the one whose logo appears on the most products. It will be the one whose assurance system others can accept without asking the producer to prove the same facts again.