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The OECD Pesticides Programme has issued an OECD Best Practices Guidance that addresses compliance and enforcement issues as they relate to pesticides and associated health and environmental risks. The objective of this document is to provide guidance for promoting and monitoring compliance and for assessing and mitigating risks of non-compliance. It is targeted primarily at pesticide regulators, but may also interest policy makers as well as regulated parties (i.e. pesticide industry).

Compliance is of high importance to pesticide risk reduction and to the proper functioning of pesticide regulatory systems that could be undermined in case of non-compliance.

This document addresses the following areas of the pesticide life-cycle:

• Manufacturing and product integrity;
• Distribution (including transportation and sale);
• Product use;
• Product storage; and
• Container recycling and disposal.

For each of the above-mentioned areas, this document:

• reviews regulatory requirements, and lists compliance and enforcement activities that regulators can conduct to ensure compliance
• includes guidance on how to detect problems, check compliance and determine whether a problem of non-compliance does exist
• provides factors to consider when assessing risk of non-compliance
• informs about risk tolerance and risk management options (including communication aspects)
• provides guidance on the evaluation of effectiveness of the responses given to non-compliance

This Guidance was developed by an ad hoc Expert Group on Pesticide Best Practices Compliance, as part of the OECD pesticide risk reduction activities and was approved by the OECD Working Group on Pesticides, a group composed primarily of representatives of the 34 OECD governments but that also includes representatives of the European Commission and other international organisations, the (bio-)pesticide industry, and the environmental & consumer community.

The OECD Series on Pesticides includes documents that are developed by the OECD Pesticides Programme, that is part of the OECD work on chemical safety. Such documents include reports from workshops and seminars but also guidance documents or survey reports.