Food safety, feed safety, animal health and animal welfare rules and plant health rules are almost fully based on Community law. Following the adoption, in January 2000, of the White Paper on Food Safety a deep process of revision of Community policy in these areas has been undertaken aimed at achieving a high level of health protection for Europe’s food consumers whilst ensuring the effective functioning of the internal market.
Such a strong Community oriented integrated approach requires a high level of competence and expertise of the controlling authorities and imposes high standards on control officials in the Member States so as to ensure that officials involved in control activities are efficient, objective and adequately skilled.
Animals, products of animal and plant origin, all food and feed imported into the Community shall comply with the relevant requirements and conditions recognised by the Community or at least be equivalent thereto. In order to help trade partners to become familiar with Community import requirements and to enhance international trade the Commission considers it important that, where appropriate, the training courses should also be open to participants from third countries, in particular developing countries. Where appropriate, particular attention should be also paid to countries covered by the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). The involvement of staff of the competent authorities in third countries in Community training activities is also important in order to enable them to disseminate the knowledge acquired in their own countries.

The activities envisaged for implementation in 2007 were divided in 6 lots, i.e. in 6 separate contracts, depending on the topics of the foreseen training activities. The Contract Notice for these activities was published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 29.07.2006 (OJ/S 143). Following a subsequent competitive tender procedure, the informal consortia lead by Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale dell’Abruzzo e del Molise “Giuseppe Caporale” (IZS A&M) won three of the six contracts, namely:

	Organisation of Training Courses on Veterinary Checks in Seaport Border Inspection Posts A series of three three-day training courses
	Organisation of Training Courses on Monitoring and Controls of Zoonoses and Applying Microbiological Criteria in Foodstuffs A series of five four-day training courses
	Organisation of a Training Workshop on Animal Welfare Issues One training workshop

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* Excerpt from Specifications to Invitation to Tender SANCO/2006/E2/021