Under the European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument (ENPI), the Latvian State Plant Protection Service - in partnership with the Polish State Plant Health and Seed Inspection Service (Piorin), Cultivar Research and Analysis Centre (Coboru) and the Netherlands Agricultural Inspection Service (Naktuinbouw) - has launched a Twinning project in Ukraine "Alignment of Ukrainian legislation on national supervision of GMO in open systems, plant variety protection and seed and plant propagating material production with EU norms and standards"
The main objective of the project is to help overcome weaknesses in national supervision (control) of GMO compliance with safeguards and dissemination in open systems, plant variety protection and seed and planting material production. The specific objective is to align national legislation in line with EU Directives and Regulations on national supervision (control) of GMO in open systems, plant variety protection and the production of seed and planting material and to improve relevant national supervision (control) systems in line with EU standards in order to implement the EU acquis.
The project implements three components simultaneously:
- Aligning the legislation;
- evaluation of the organization and functioning of the Authority;
- evaluation of the organization and functioning of phytosanitary laboratories.
The duration of the project is 21 months.
The project is expected to deliver the following results:
- Adapt 10 EU legislative acts according to expert proposals
- Prepare methodological recommendations and a monitoring programme for the identification of GMO.
- Produce 10 000 units of information material and 3 publications in the media
- Prepare a functional assessment separately for the Authority and the phytosanitary laboratories
- Development of internal regulations
- Development of planning and strategic documents (action plans, implementation strategy and communication strategy)
- Training of a total of 190 staff (including training of staff of the Authority and its laboratories)
- A total of 10 learning visits to Latvia, Poland and the Netherlands
- Strategy (including action plan) for improving the work of the laboratories
- List of equipment required, making efficient use of existing equipment
- Development of laboratory procedures according to the action plan.
The State Plant Protection Service is implementing this project as the senior project partner, which means coordinating and managing the project. State Plant Protection Service specialists are participating as experts in the implementation of all project components.
The project is funded by the EU. The total project funding is €1.1 million.
