The project is being carried out by a consortium composed of OPERA Srl (Lead Company), the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale della Lombardia e dell’Emilia Romagna (IZSLER) and the Food and Veterinary Office of Latvia.

IZSLER is part of the network of Italian Zooprophylactic institutes and is one of the leading Italian institutes due to its geographical location in the heart of the livestock and food production areas of Italy. IZSLER operates in support of the public veterinary sectors and in particular, to Regional and Central Veterinary Services, breeders and consumers. IZSLER has a well-established and diversified network of 18 separate laboratories carrying out over 300  accredited testing methods in the field of animal health and food safety. www.izsler.it

Food and Veterinary Service (FVS) of the Republic of Latvia is the national competent authority responsible for food safety, animal by-products, animal health and welfare, animal feed and veterinary medical products, food contact materials and sanitary and phytosanitary border controls (14 BIPs).

http://www.pvd.gov.lv/eng

The purpose of the project is to provide EU Member States and non-EU countries with technical training and on-the-spot technical assistance, in order to support them in complying with EU feed and food safety standards and animal health and welfare and plant health rules.

The training programme includes 18 workshops and a series of sustained training and technical assistance missions (STMs), which will be carried out in EU Member States and the following neighbouring non-EU countries: the candidate countries (Albania, Montenegro, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Turkey), the potential candidate countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo), the Mediterranean European Neighbouring countries (Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia) and the Eastern European Neighbouring countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine).

The training sessions will be aimed at strengthening the understanding, implementations and enforcement of EU law in the following fields:

–          Food and feed law, including quality aspects;

–          Animal health rules;

–          Animal welfare rules;

–          Plant protection and plant health rules.

The 18 workshops will aim at:

• providing a detailed overview and a clear, better and harmonised understanding of EU legislation in the relevant areas having regard, in particular, to recent developments of the legislation;

• delivering targeted training and information tailored to the needs of beneficiary countries in order to improve their knowledge in a specific area and increase their efficacy to verify compliance with legal requirements in this specific area;

• disseminating best practices for control procedures in order to increase the compatibility of these procedures across and outside the EU, based, if available, on FVO overview reports;

• ensuring consistent and rigorous implementation of EU rules.

Apart from the workshops, special expert missions will be organized in the above mentioned beneficiary countries. These sustained technical assistance missions (STMs) are aimed at supporting the local competent authorities in selected countries in particular with regard to the development of action plans to improve compliance with the EU law in the fields covered by the project; along with information tools and documented control procedures and effective verification mechanisms in food and feed law, animal health and welfare rules and plant health and protection rules.

Target participants

The workshop is intended for staff of competent authorities of the Member States and non-EU countries involved in official control activities in the fields indicated above.

Where appropriate, industry sectors and relevant stakeholders may also participate in these training activities.

Dissemination

The BTSF programme is based on the “train the trainers” approach, and for this reason dissemination of the received knowledge is fundamental for the trainings to have a greater impact.

Participants will be requested to commit themselves to disseminate the information received via different methods, i.e. informing colleagues about the information received at the training, distributing the training materials, preparing informative articles in the professional national or, if possible, in international journals, preparing presentations based on the training materials for the staff of national Competent Authorities or other disseminating methods which could be appropriate to share the information received via the BTSF training. During the course participants will be provided with a training package to be used as supporting dissemination material.