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The Director General of the Czech Agriculture and Food Inspection Authority (CAFIA), Jakub Šebesta, the Minister of the Federal Government of Lower Austria, Christa Kranzl, and the Minister of the Federal Government of Upper Austria, Rudolf Anschober, signed yesterday in St. Pölten an agreement on co-operation within the INTERREG IIIA initiative.

A nine-month project will be launched in September this year and apart from the initial and closing professional workshop it will include mainly exchange study visits of the Czech and Austrian inspectors. The project concerns CAFIA Regional Inspectorates in Brno and Tábor whose territories of interest neighbour with Lower and Upper Austria. The objective of the “Co-operation of the Czech and Austrian food inspectors in the Czech-Austrian cross-border region” project is to exchange know-how and experience in the field of control procedures and tools, to inform each other about the quality of supervision over food safety, and to establish personal contacts. The project should thus result in the establishment of an information network based on mutual relationships and knowledge of partners working in the Czech-Austrian cross-border regions. On the basis of this network it will be possible to build further co-operation in the future. Better awareness should thus lead to the strengthening of consumer confidence in foodstuffs produced in neighbouring regions and contribute to the strengthening of trade exchange of food products. For the CAFIA, the overall financial costs will be more than CZK 600,000, 75% of which will be refunded from EU sources.

The Community initiatives, among which the INTERREG IIIA belongs, are special programmes established by the European Commission to address specific issues concerning the whole EU territory. They supplement other EC programmes or facilitate their implementation. The objective of the INTERREG IIIA initiative is to support cross-border co-operation of neighbouring regions of the Member States.

The CAFIA has rich experience in the field of international projects. Up to now the CAFIA has implemented three own PHARE projects, the last one of which will be finished this year, and in previous years it has co-operated on another project. Furthermore, the CAFIA took part in the QUID Thematic Network project implemented within the 5th framework programme, in the DIGIT-ROSTLINA project based on Czech-Flemish co-operation, and, among others, it is taking part in the Czech-Italian project SAFE FOOD all over Europe.

Photo: On Monday, 6 June 2005, the CAFIA Director General, Ing. Jakub Šebesta, with the Minister of the Federal Government of Lower Austria, Christa Kranzl, and the Minister of the Federal Government of Upper Austria, Rudolf Anschober, signed an agreement on co-operation within the INTERREG IIIA project. The agreement was signed in St. Pölten in Lower Austria.

Photo by: A. Schroll, Federal Government of Lower Austria