The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service issued emails May 14, 2012, announcing changes to some Plant Protection and Quarantine (PPQ) electronic manuals. While some changes are minor, other changes may affect the admissibility of the plant products, including fruits, vegetables, and flowers.
On May 10, 2012, the Foreign Agricultural Service issued the following GAIN reports:
The Agricultural Marketing Service released a new publicly available web service for its Livestock Mandatory Reporting (LMR) system. According to AMS, this web service: offers easier access to all historical LMR data; follows commonly accepted technical standards for the automated retrieval of historical data sets by end-users; and allows users to pull large amounts of customized data sets automatically or on-demand. AMS said the Livestock Mandatory Reporting program facilitates price discovery and "provides all market participants, both large and small, with comparable levels of market information for cattle, swine, sheep, beef and lamb meat." The web service is in the tools section at the bottom left of this webpage.
The Food Safety and Inspection Service said the Codex Committee on Pesticide Residues (CCPR) held its 44th Session on April 23-28 in Shanghai, China. FSIS said about 300 representatives from 182 countries and regions attended the meeting. According to FSIS, the Session resulted in the following:
The Food Safety and Inspection Service revised export requirements and plant lists for the following countries for the week of May 4 through May 10, 2012:
The Phytosanitary Certificate and Issuance Tracking (PCIT) system was down on the afternoon of May 10, 2012, reports the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. APHIS sent out several emails, beginning at about 12:30 p.m., saying PCIT was down due to a hardware problem at the hosting facility. APHIS said the PCIT application was then failed over to the Disaster Recovery site. At about 5 p.m., an APHIS email said all functionality in PCIT had been restored, except certificate printing may be slow. APHIS said the PCIT Training Site will be unavailable until it is failed back to the primary production site.
The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service issued emails May 10, 2012 announcing changes to some Plant Protection and Quarantine (PPQ) electronic manuals. While some changes are minor, other changes may affect the admissibility of the plant products, including fruits, vegetables, and flowers.
On May 10, 2012, the Foreign Agricultural Service issued the following GAIN reports:
The Food Safety and Inspection Service said the Committee on Import and Export Certification and Inspection Systems (CCFICS) established a Codex electronic working group (eWG), chaired by the U.S., to develop a questionnaire on how countries currently assess and manage the performance of their national food control systems and to give examples of indicators used. This questionnaire will be circulated by the Codex Secretariat, and, based on the replies, the U.S. will prepare a more detailed discussion paper and project document for the next session of CCFICS. FSIS said Codex members and observers interested in participating in the electronic working group should provide their name, title and e-mail address to USCodex@fsis.usda.gov by May 18, 2012.
On May 9, 2012, the Foreign Agricultural Service issued the following GAIN reports: