U.S. Preparing Positions for Pesticide Residues Meeting
The Beijing meeting takes place April 13-18, and U.S. agencies are sponsoring a public meeting March 16 to take comments on the agenda items.
USDA's Office of the Under Secretary for Food Safety, the Food Safety and Inspection Service, and EPA are sponsoring a public meeting March 16 in order to collect comments about the agenda items and draft U.S. positions that will be discussed at the 47th Session of the Codex Committee on Pesticide Residues (CCPR) of the Codex Alimentarius Commission. That meeting will take place April 13-18 in Beijing, China.
The two-hour March 16 meeting will begin at 2 p.m. and will take place at the EPA offices at 2777 South Crystal Drive in Arlington, Va. Documents related to the 47th Session of CCPR will be accessible online here: http://www.codexalimentarius.org/meetings-reports/en/.
Barbara Madden, U.S. delegate to the 47th Session of the CCPR, the EPA, and the USDA invite interested parties to submit their comments electronically to the following e-mail address: [email protected].
Through adoption of food standards, codes of practice, and other guidelines developed by its committees and by promoting their adoption and implementation by governments, Codex seeks to protect the health of consumers and ensure that fair practices are used in the food trade. The CCPR is responsible for establishing maximum limits for pesticide residues in specific food items or in groups of food, establishing maximum limits for pesticide residues in certain animal feeding stuffs moving in international trade where this is justified for reasons of protection of human health, preparing priority lists of pesticides for evaluation by the Joint FAO/WHO Meeting on Pesticide Residues (JMPR), considering methods of sampling and analysis for the determination of pesticide residues in food and feed, considering other matters in relation to the safety of food and feed containing pesticide residues, and establishing maximum limits for environmental and industrial contaminants showing chemical or other similarity to pesticides in specific food items or groups of food.