Partner 16

The Dutch Plant Protection Service is part of the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (Nederlandse Voedsel en Warenautoriteit (NVWA)), an independent agency in the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The task of the NVWA is to protect human and animal health. It monitors food and consumer products to safeguard public health and animal health and welfare. The Authority controls the whole production chain, from raw materials and processing aids to end products and consumption. The Netherlands Plant Protection Organisation is part of the NVWA and responsible for implementation of EU requirements for plant health checks, including supervision and audits of the General Inspection bodies. Other instruments of NPPO include specific surveillance for monitoring the presence of plant pests and diseases in the Netherlands in general. Because of its expertise the NPPO represents the Netherlands in international bodies such as the Standing Committee on Plant Health of the EU and the meeting of Chief officers of Plant Health Services (COPHs). NPPO contributes expert judgement in panels of the EPPO and is engaged in several projects aimed at designing and implementing plant health policy in countries in Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. The National Reference Centre (NRC) of the NPPO focuses on the development, implementation and validation of methods for detection and identification and confirmatory diagnosis, especially for quarantine pests and pathogens. The NRC has participated in many (international) projects on biology, epidemiology, detection and taxonomy of (quarantine) diseases and pests. The NRC is 17025 accredited for a number of scopes.

The NVWA will be deputy work package leader for WP 3 (Quality standards) and will participate in WP 2 (Inventory), WP4 (Access), WP5 (Info-portal), WP6 (Network of reference collections) and WP7 (Dissemination).