National Assembly passes Law on Plant Protection and Quarantine

Before passing this draft Law, delegates contributed and gave opinions to perfect the specific contents and regulations.

On the morning of November 25, under the direction of Vice Chairwoman of the National Assembly Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, the National Assembly passed the Law on Plant Protection and Quarantine (PPP) with a majority of votes in favor.

Mr. Phan Xuan Dung, Member of the Standing Committee of the National Assembly (NA), Chairman of the NA Committee on Science, Technology and Environment, said that there were 21 opinions of NA deputies speaking at the meeting hall and 1 written opinion sent to the Session Secretariat to comment on this Law project.

Before passing this draft Law, the delegates contributed and gave their opinions to perfect the specific contents and provisions. In general, the National Assembly deputies highly appreciated the explanation, reception and revision of the draft Law on Plant Protection and Quarantine, basically agreeing with the provisions in the draft Law submitted to the National Assembly this time. However, there were also some comments suggesting to clarify or specify the contents of some articles and clauses in the draft Law.

Prohibition of bringing soil into our country

According to Mr. Phan Xuan Dung, regarding prohibited acts (Article 13), there are opinions suggesting that in the condition that our country's analytical equipment is still limited, it should only be regulated that seedlings with soil can be imported into certain border gates, and there should not be regulations prohibiting the import of soil into Vietnam.

The Standing Committee of the National Assembly said that the practice of quarantine activities shows that soil is an object with a high risk of carrying harmful organisms. Quarantine and treatment of soil is complicated, requiring highly precise machinery and equipment... For our country, with a long border, the amount of plant goods exchanged through official border gates and border trails is very large, so controlling plants carried in soil is very difficult.

However, to protect domestic agricultural production, we have made great efforts in plant quarantine, not allowing plant products carrying soil to be imported. Therefore, the draft Law stipulates that it is reasonable to prohibit the import of soil into Vietnam, except in cases where there is written consent from the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development (such as for scientific research, diplomatic gifts, etc.). The laws of many countries in the world, especially advanced and developed countries such as the US, Japan, China, Korea and the International Convention on Plant Protection, all have similar provisions.

In addition, some National Assembly deputies suggested adding the following content: not applying or intentionally applying incorrect disease prevention and control measures to allow harmful organisms to spread, causing serious consequences. This content has been accepted and edited.

200 billion VND/year used to destroy packaging

Regarding the destruction of plant protection drugs, many National Assembly deputies suggested that it is necessary to add regulations on checking the quality of unclaimed plant protection drugs before destroying them because many batches of unclaimed plant protection drugs are still within their expiry date and are still of good quality to avoid wasting the provincial People's Committee's budget in destroying these pesticides.

According to the Standing Committee of the National Assembly, in reality, currently unclaimed pesticides are mainly smuggled, unknown origin, fake drugs... If the regulation stipulates that the responsibility of the State management agency is to check the quality of unclaimed pesticides before destroying them, it is not feasible, because this agency does not have enough funding, human resources and equipment to do so. Therefore, this provision should not be added to the draft Law to ensure the strictness of the law.

Regarding the collection and treatment of used pesticide packaging, the Standing Committee of the National Assembly said: According to the report of the Plant Protection Department, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Vietnam's pesticides are mainly imported with the usage volume of about 70,000 tons of finished pesticides/year; total revenue is about 1 billion USD (equivalent to about 21,000 billion VND). Corresponding to the amount of finished pesticides mentioned above is the amount of used packaging of about 7,000 tons/year (about 10% of the total amount of finished pesticides).

With a treatment cost of 25 million VND/ton, the total cost for destruction is estimated at nearly 200 billion VND/year. Thus, if the environmental protection tax is regulated at an average of about 2% of total pesticide sales revenue, the state budget will have enough funds to collect and destroy used packaging. Currently, the technology for treating pesticide packaging is gradually being perfected, in the future this cost will decrease, and at the same time, there will be many types of packaging that can be recycled without having to be destroyed.

Therefore, the cost of collecting and treating pesticide packaging is regulated as a local budget expenditure. Furthermore, the Law on Environmental Protection is currently being revised; the responsibilities of waste source owners in general and organizations and individuals producing and trading pesticides in particular will also be studied and regulated to suit the reality and the correlation between the subjects.

Therefore, the draft Law has added provisions on the obligations of pesticide production facilities, the obligations of organizations and individuals trading in pesticides in implementing the provisions of the law on environmental protection tax and other provisions of the law./.