(RASFF) Annual Report 2009 - European Commission - Europa

The Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF)
With a login and password to the RASFF Window, notifications are directly
available to competent authorities of a third country represented by a
nominated contact point. Also the country’s embassy in Brussels, the
delegation of the European Union in that country and desk officers responsible
for this third country at the Commission are given access to the notifications.
The transmission is rapid and effective: notifications are uploaded within 24
working hours from their issuing in the RASFF.
The condition for becoming a “RASFF Window
country” is identifying a single contact point in the
third country that is responsible for assigning logins
to the competent authorities or for monitoring the
RASFF Window itself and forwarding notifications
to the ministries or agencies involved. All the
concerned parties, that had been given a login and
password, receive automatic e-mails informing them
about new notifications or follow-up notifications in
RASFF Window for their country of interest that can
be checked online immediately.
The system became operational in 2008, but the
majority of the countries started using it in 2009.
In cases where it has not yet been possible to identify a single contact point,
as an intermediate solution, the EU delegation in the country downloads the
notifications from RASFF Window and transmits them to the appropriate
competent authority. The final goal is for all third countries to use RASFF
Window either directly or through the EU delegations.
At the celebration of RASFF’s 30th birthday (see chapter four), the new
RASFF Portal website was inaugurated. It marked the opening of the publicly
searchable RASFF Portal database. The database is identical to the RASFF
Window database, but only a limited set of data for each notification are
made available to the public. Nonetheless, all market and border rejection
notifications are searchable going back to 1979, the first year of operation of
the system.
While the systems mentioned above were finalised and put in place, work
continued on a new generation platform for RASFF member countries to
transmit and work together on RASFF notifications: iRASFF.
RASFF Portal
iRASFF: the “i” for
“interactive”
The new software will provide an online and real-time platform allowing
countries to notify in a clear, detailed and structured way. The major novelty
in this application is the possibility for countries to add their follow up into the
original notification rather than appending it. This allows for a better overview
of the current state of a notification as it evolves. The system is foreseen to be
implemented in early 2011.
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