WORLD TRADE  
ORGANIZATION  G/SPS/GEN/483 
31 March 2004 
 (04-1452) 
Committee on Sanitary a nd Phytosanitary Measures Original:   English 
   
THE INTERNATIONAL PORTAL FOR FOOD SAFETY, 
ANIMAL AND PLANT HEALTH  
 
Information Paper by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
 
at the Meeting of 17-18 March 2004  
 
 
The need for the portal  
 
1. The changing patterns of food and agricultural production, greater attention to the 
environmental impact of agriculture, emergenc e of new technologies and potential contaminants, 
increase in international trade, and a heightened c onsumer awareness of food safety and animal health 
issues have all combined to increase interest in global sanitary and phytosanitary measures. 
2. This interest comes from intern ational agencies;  national trade, agriculture, food safety, 
environment and consumer protection services;  inte rnational trading partners;  and private sector 
organizations.  Each requires relia ble information on standards, regul ations, scientific evaluations, and 
other supporting information to make decisions on trade-related issues or to prepare relevant 
regulations or measures. 
3. Despite the broad level of interest, obtaining accura te and current information can be difficult.  
A user may need to search the websites of a number of different international standard setting bodies 
to retrieve all the relevant information on a pa rticular commodity or on a specific topic that 
transverses traditional sectors.  The same scenario is repeated at th e national level where standards, 
regulations, and related informa tion may be spread across the websites of several agencies. 
4. There are two common problems:  (a) information may be difficult to locate;  and (b) it may 
not always be clear which source represents the official position on a given subject.  This is 
compounded where information is relevant to multiple sectors or more than one country. 
The purpose of the portal  
5. Based on the above considerations, FAO is lead ing an interagency initiative, intending to 
involve the relevant international agencies, sta ndard setting bodies and national authorities to develop 
an internet-based-portal – the International Portal on Food Safety, Animal and Plant Health 
(IPFSAPH)  – which will permit an authoritative search fo r current standards, regulations and other 
relevant official materials from a single access point. 
6. Some important user groups are expected to include: 
• those involved in promotion of safe production and trade (relevant ministries, the commercial 
sector and development agencies); 
• international trade regulators (customs and SPS authorities); 
• WTO SPS inquiry points; G/SPS/GEN/483 
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• (policy) researchers 
7. The types of questions to be addressed by the portal will include the following: 
• International Standards  - what standards exist for a particular commodity? 
• Scientific Evaluations  – what supporting scientific evalua tions underpin the international 
standards? 
• Trade disputes, concerns and notifications  – which commodities have led to international 
concerns being raised, between wh ich countries and for what reasons? 
• Risk Analysis  – what official risk assessments have been published on a specific 
subject/about a particular commodity? 
• Contact points  – who are the official contact points in a given country for plant health, 
biosafety, food safety, animal health and WTO inquiries? 
• Import regulations  – what are the technical regulations for import (of a particular 
commodity) into a given country? 
• Pest/disease reports  – what pests/diseases have been offi cially reported recently for a given 
country? 
• Recent regulations  – what new regulations are planned which impact food safety, animal and 
plant health? 
• Inspection/Quarantine service  – how is the (country's) inspection/quarantine service 
organized? 
8. Through the main standard setting bodies (t he Codex Alimentarius Commission (Codex), 
International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) and the World Organization for Animal Health 
(OIE)), FAO is also seeking to mobilize national support to make national san itary and phytosanitary 
information available through the portal. 
Design considerations  
Ownership
 
9. To date, systems created to collect and disse minate sanitary and phytosanitary information 
have had only limited success.  Those interpreting official sources usually fail to satisfy as users need 
to revert to the original source to be confident th at essential components have not been lost.  Systems 
for countries to publish materials have been undermin ed by users failing to supply (or provide updates 
for) the requested data, usually because ma terial is already published elsewhere. 
10. With this in mind, the project has taken as a primary objective to avoid duplication of effort 
and minimize the cost of participation  by linking to existing sites wherever possible.  Data owners 
remain fully responsible for maintenance and lia ble for the quality of the content displayed. 
Maintenance  
11. To facilitate these arrangements without major maintenance costs, the construction of the 
portal must be as automated as possible.  Simply including links to current web pages would mean a  G/SPS/GEN/483 
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majority of broken links within a short period (man ually entered links "break" when source web sites 
are redesigned). 
12. One way of achieving cost-effective maintenan ce – and of solving the broken link problem – 
is through the use of metadata, which is a systematic  description of the information resource.  Data is 
loaded into the portal based on how it is described (the metadata) on o fficially published source sites.  
The quality of the information in the portal beco mes critically dependent on the quality of the 
description of the resources on source sites, and on the mapping of those descriptions to the portal's own set of keywords and information types.  A l ong-term goal of the portal is the adoption of one 
standard set of metadata by all source sites. 
Language
 
13. The use of formal metadata is also useful fo r handling material in multiple languages.  The 
portal makes documents available in whatever language  it was supplied, in addition to a description of 
the resource in one of three core languages (English, French, Spanish).  Translation of all of the controlled vocabulary will eventually permit keyw ord searches to be performed in each language.  
The portal can currently search for translations of  country and organization names, and commodity 
codes in multiple languages if this optio n is selected in the search mechanism. 
Current status of the project and timetable  
The project is being implemented in the following stages: 
Develop a prototype and test with users
 
14. The portal prototype currently (March 2004) contains content drawn from the three SPS-
recognized standard setting bodies, WTO, CBD, FAO' s internal legislation and regulatory database 
(FAOLEX), in addition to a demons tration "node" of 250 items from the United States.  There are 
currently over 13,000 items referenced by the portal. 
15. The portal has undergone testing within FAO and w ith partners from the content providers.  
Further work is planned over the coming months w ith external users from the user groups identified 
above. 
Extension of internati onal and national coverage  
16. In addition, further work is underway to exte nd coverage to include EU information, as well 
as some sample data sets from developing countries  A second area where coverage is to be extended 
is the addition of further supporting material to the official standards (fo r instance, residue and 
toxicological evaluations associated with the setting of MRLs in Codex). 
Launch Version 1.0 of the IPFSAPH  
17. The portal site is currently in a phase of "sof t launch" – but defined as being openly available 
for comment (at www.ipfsaph.org) , but not findable through Google or linked from the FAO web 
pages.  It will be forma lly launched on 25 May 2004. G/SPS/GEN/483 
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Extend IPFSAPH scope
 
18. The formal launch will be supported by a progr amme of capacity building integrated into 
existing capacity building efforts by the various agencies, with further programmes to be well 
coordinated between agencies.  This will include: 
• building awareness and understanding of the benefi ts of information exchange to support safe 
trade; 
• development of national strategies for the exchange of official information; 
• assistance in the development of computing fac ilities and information management capacity to 
support information exchange; 
• human resource development and training sessions for national authorities on the use of the portal 
and data input and editin g functionality;  and 
• tailored training sessions to targeted audiences of end users on the use of the portal. 
19. Through this capacity building programme, it is envisaged that further arrangements can be 
made with other countries for automatic and/or manual loading of their national information. 
20. In the meantime, for further info rmation on the portal please contact: 
 Mike Robson, IPFSAPH Project Manager 
 at:  Mike.Robson@fao.org  
  Niek van der Graaff, Chairman FAO Biosecurity Inter-Departmental Working Group  at:  Niek.VanDerGraaff@fao.org
 
 
 Ezzeddine Boutrif, Secretary FAO Biosecurity Inter-Departmental Working Group  at:  Ezzeddine.Boutrif@fao.org
 
 
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