The new version of ISPM 8 is already implemented!

Rome, 17 June 2021. National Plant Protection Organizations (NPPOs) use pest status for various activities, such as pest risk analysis, the establishment of and implementation of phytosanitary regulations and the establishment of lists of regulated pests. This information is also used for the establishment and maintenance of pest free areas, areas of low pest prevalence and pest free places of production and pest free production sites. The NPPO decides upon the most appropriate description of the pest status in an area, based on information from various sources including results from surveillance (see ISPM 6). The First Session of the Interim Commission on Phytosanitary Measures (November, 1998) adopted the first version of ISPM 8 (Determination of pest status in an area, 1998) which outlined pest status in terms of three categories including presence, absence and transience of the pest. The fifteenth Commission on Phytosanitray Measures (CPM 15) recently adopted the first revision of ISPM 8 since its establishment in 1998, which has reduced the main categories to only two: the presence or absence of a pest.

The International Phytosanitary Portal (IPP) is an internet-based information system designed to hold phytosanitary information published in accordance with the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) and the decisions of the Commission on Phytosanitary Measures. To meet one of the National Reporting Obligations (NRO), Contracting Parties (CPs) are obligated to submit pest reports, and this may be done through the IPP. When entering information into the IPP on pest reports, a drop-down menu, populated with the values of the pest status categories from ISPM 8 which helps ensure the data entered is harmonized. With the adoption of a revised ISPM 8 this dropdown list needed to be updated and values from the 1998 version of ISPM 8 needed to be mapped to the revised values.

The fourth meeting of Implementation and Capacity Development (IC) Team on NROs considered and agreed how to map correspondence pest status values between the two versions of ISPM 8 and this is included in the June 2021 IC Team on NRO’s meeting report. Following this decision, the dropdown menu associated with pest status categories was updated. The values of pest status from previous pest reports were kept to facilitate CP to be able to see their history records in the pest report database.