Costs for testing, certification of agricultural, food products for export to be cut in Moldova

Chisinau, 28 October /MOLDPRES/ - Following the consultations with the business environment representatives at a last September meeting of the Economic Council’s, Prime Minister Iurie Leanca asked the Agriculture, Health Ministries and the National Agency for Food Safety to simplify procedures and reduce the costs for testing and certification of agricultural and food products meant for export, the Secretariat of the Economic Council of the Prime Minister has reported.

This solution will facilitate the export of Moldovan products, and will cut costs for entrepreneurs, which is a hamper, particularly for small and medium enterprises.

Thus, the aforementioned state institutions will take the following actions by 15 November:

(a) will analyse the costs of the services of testing and certification of agricultural and food products, applied by specialised laboratories, and re-evaluation of the justification of their size;

(b) will propose measures to reduce the costs incurred by economic agents who use the services of specialised laboratories, subordinated to the above-mentioned institutions, by at least 20 per cent;

(c) will identify solutions to increase the term of validity of the results of the laboratory investigations for samples and products with minimum risk to food safety and public health by at least 30 per cent;

(d) will optimise the sampling procedure, sending samples to laboratories, sending results and minimising the number of economic agents to laboratories and minimising terms for testing and certification of agricultural and food products for export.

A similar intervention signalled at meetings of the Economic Council of the Prime Minister has already yielded results for the testing and certification of vine and wine products.This led to an approximately 30-per cent cut of these costs starting from July 2014.