Posted on Fri, 10 Jun 2016, 11:47

Deadline on Thu, 29 Dec 2016, 23:00

The IPPC Secretariat has been preparing a new homepage for the International Phytosanitary Portal (IPP) website. An important new feature on the website is called “Brief News”; news of phytosanitary relevance at national, regional or international levels, primarily sourced from NPPOs and RPPOs. Each news item should consist of a short description (two - five sentences) of the news content and a link to the website where the original news article is posted. The brief introduction and the news article should be written in one of the official UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian or Spanish).

These news items may come from a wide variety of sources, for example: newspapers, general publications, books, journals, websites and social media. The topics to be covered should be the IPPC or plant health in general, such as latest news on pest occurrence, successful completion of phytosanitary measures applied by countries, interesting phytosanitary meetings of regional or international relevance, the launch of pest or plant databases, plant health challenges, plant health related successes, and other subjects related to the work of the IPPC (see examples).

The Brief News is meant to compliment the IPPC Headline News, which covers key activities or news relating to the work programme of the IPPC and which the IPPC Secretariat is directly involved in writing. Depending on its relevance and importance, some brief news will be upgraded to IPPC headline news. It is anticipated that the new home page will be launched in the second half of June 2016 and the Secretariat aims to have a significant number of brief news articles of interest uploaded in this occasion to build plant health communication within the IPPC Community.

The Secretary to the IPPC, Mr Xia, invites all contracting parties and regional plant protection organizations (RPPOs) to send such news items regularly to the IPPC Secretariat. The expectation is for each NPPO or RPPO to provide at least 10 brief news items per annum. Please send the Brief News items to the IPPC Secretariat ([email protected]).

The IPPC Secretariat will review the brief news items and decide whether it matches the criteria outlined above. The Secretariat will provide monthly statistics on contributions by contracting parties and RPPOs. Examples of IPPC Brief News are attached.

Messages in other UN languages to follow.