IPPC Celebrates its 60th Anniversary

The International Plant Protection Convention at 60 years: increasingly essential as pest risk increases due to globalization.

Rome, 6th of December of 2011. The International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) will celebrate its 60th anniversary in 2012. This multilateral international agreement was signed on 6 December 1951 and entered into force on 3 April 1952. During the past six decades, the IPPC has become the core international agreement that aims to protect cultivated and wild plants by preventing the introduction and spread of pests. The anniversary will serve to emphasize the importance of controlling pests through international cooperation and national action.

Globalization, international travel and trade are at greater pace than ever before. As people and commodities move around the world, organisms that present risks to plants can often travel with them. Despite annual global sales of pesticides for the control of pests reaching $45bn, plant pests remain a major constraint to crop production worldwide resulting in production losses of approximately 20-40%. Preventing the introduction of new environmentally and economically important pests into a country is far more cost effective than trying to eradicate or manage the pest after introduction.

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