4th Meeting of the Panel on General Standards on Efficacy Evaluation
Luxemburg, 2004-03-23/24
The 4th meeting of the Panel on General Standards took place in Luxemburg, at the Plant Protection Service, on 2004-03-23/24, at the kind invitation of Mr Aschman. Thanks are due to him and Mrs Faber for excellent organization and warm hospitability. In the evening, participants had the opportunity to visit the old city centre, to descend (by lift) and ascend (on foot) the tall fortifications and to enjoy wonderful food and wine in one of the famous restaurants.
The Panel discussed a revision of the published general standards for the efficacy evaluation of plant protection products, the standards PP 1/135 Phytotoxicity assessment and 1 /152 Design and analysis of efficacy evaluation trials. The document on taint tests with plant protection products, sent to EPPO member countries for comment, was reviewed and difficulties were still found in deciding what are the triggers for doing taint tests. It will be discussed further at the next meeting. The Panel considered the document on transformation processes ready to be sent to member countries for comment. Considerable progress was made with a revision of the document on comparable climates now generalized to comparability of efficacy evaluation data. In view of the fact that the EU Commission is intending to propose an ‘eco-zoning’ of the EU territory for the purposes of mutual recognition, the Panel will work rapidly on biologically based climate maps which could technically justify such zoning.
The first draft of a standard on expression of dose of plant protection products was presented and thoroughly studied. This resolves the problems of the different national systems for expression of dose and will be improved for the next meeting.