The purpose of the project is to provide EU Member States and non-EU countries with technical training and on-the-spot technical assistance, in order to support them in complying with EU feed and food safety standards and animal health and welfare and plant health rules.

The training programme includes 2 phases, each of 18 workshops*, and a series of sustained training and technical assistance missions (STMs), which will be carried out in EU Member States and the following neighbouring non-EU countries: the candidate countries (Albania, Montenegro, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Turkey), the potential candidate countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo), the Mediterranean European Neighbouring countries (Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia) and the Eastern European Neighbouring countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine).

*Number of workshops may be modified following outbreak of COVID-19 pandemics.

The training sessions will be aimed at strengthening the understanding, implementations and enforcement of EU law in the following fields:

–          Food and feed law, including quality aspects;

–          Animal health rules;

–          Animal welfare rules;

–          Plant protection and plant health rules.

The workshops will aim at:

• providing a detailed overview and a clear, better and harmonised understanding of EU legislation in the relevant areas having regard, in particular, to recent developments of the legislation;

• delivering targeted training and information tailored to the needs of beneficiary countries in order to improve their knowledge in a specific area and increase their efficacy to verify compliance with legal requirements in this specific area;

• disseminating best practices for control procedures in order to increase the compatibility of these procedures across and outside the EU, based, if available, on FVO overview reports;

• ensuring consistent and rigorous implementation of EU rules.

Apart from the workshops, special expert missions will be organized in the above mentioned beneficiary countries. These sustained technical assistance missions (STMs) are aimed at supporting the local competent authorities in selected countries in particular with regard to the development of action plans to improve compliance with the EU law in the fields covered by the project; along with information tools and documented control procedures and effective verification mechanisms in food and feed law, animal health and welfare rules and plant health and protection rules.