Our Plant Health Learning Pathways

The Plant Health thematic covers two different but equally important aspects:

• Conformity of plant products with standards that guarantee food safety. These standards mainly concern pesticide residues (compliance with maximum residue levels, MRLs) and certain environmental contaminants (heavy metals and mycotoxins).
• Ensuring the absence of regulated pests (including "quarantine pests") – insects, nematodes, viruses, fungi or bacteria – which are not naturally present in a given region but which may be introduced unintentionally via international transport.

To ensure food safety and security, States must develop a preservation and protection policy — called "phytosanitary policy" — that encompasses all the elements of a concerted strategy: hazard identification; assessment of sanitary and phytosanitary risks in the country of introduction; communication of these risks between stakeholders; inspection of food producers and facilities; traceability of product batches; border surveillance; development of value chain control programmes with planning and sampling, detection and monitoring; control of food safety risks; and identification of contaminants and pests by a competent laboratory.

To address all these very different aspects, this Plant Health course is structured as five routes. Each route has two levels. The intermediate level allows you to tackle the subject and to understand the main principles, without going into all the details of implementation. Successful completion of a test will give you access to the advanced level, where you can progress in understanding the subject and address the more practical aspects of implementation (details of the steps to follow, planning of operations, procedures to implement, reporting of results, etc.).

All five routes combined will enable you to achieve a very broad level of knowledge about Plant Health; however, each route can be studied as a stand-alone resource.

This thematic is dedicated to scientists (including academics), experts and public service employees involved in:

• assessment of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) risks, particularly Pest Risk Assessment (PRA)
• preparation of export market access dossiers
• drafting of opinions addressed to Competent Authorities
• collaboration in the resolution of sanitary crises
• provision of scientific advice on a State's surveillance and control programmes

Enhanced skills:

• Organise and conduct risk assessment(s)
• Draw up reasoned scientific opinions for Competent Authorities
• Prepare market access files (as recommended in the IPPC Market Access guide)
• Propose appropriate SPS measures to Competent Authorities

This thematic is dedicated to public service officials belonging to the Competent Authorities of ACP States, responsible for plant protection and plant health inspection (pests and residues); phytosanitary inspectors.

Enhanced skills:

• Organise and manage inspection services (official controls)
• Carry out inspections in companies in the horticultural sector and detect regulatory non-compliance
• Perform sampling, and transfer samples to the appropriate laboratories
• Issue an alert in case of detection of harmful organisms

This thematic is dedicated to people who must organize, manage and lead an analytical laboratory. They are responsible for the management of the quality system (e.g. ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation), maintenance of their analytical chains, validation of analytical methods, reporting, etc.

Enhanced skills:

• Organise and manage a laboratory (chemical contaminant analysis laboratory; plant health diagnosis: entomology, plant pathology, nematology)
• Develop and validate analytical methods to meet local/regional needs
• Create a business plan for the laboratory to ensure its sustainability

This thematic is dedicated to service providers. In line with the cascade approach, ACP experts trained in the field are also needed, for example to strengthen the training skills of inspection service officials during their training of plant health inspectors.

Enhanced skills:

• Assimilate the regulatory requirements in the sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) field in order to summarise them
• Assimilate the various technical aspects necessary in the SPS field in order to summarise them