Plant protection products are subject to a number of monitoring measures by various authorities at federal and Land level.

The Federal Office for Food Safety (BAES) is responsible for monitoring the marketing of plant protection products on the basis of the Plant Protection Products Act 2011 as amended.

The control of the use of plant protection products by the user is the responsibility of the Länder and is regulated by nine national laws, some of which are different.

The term "placing on the market" not only refers to the sale of plant protection products but also to storage, advertising and other transfer. In the course of the controls of the pesticide trade, it is checked whether the offered pesticides are approved and properly labelled. Within the framework of on-site inspections, samples are also taken by the inspection bodies for further analysis of the composition in the AGES Competence Centre for Residue Analysis. In the event of gross violations of the provisions of the PMG 2011, the improper goods will be seized and provisionally confiscated.

An annual integrated control plan shall determine the number of holdings to be controlled in the following year in accordance with a risk-based sampling plan. In addition, in the course of the follow-up checks, those operations which were the subject of a complaint or notification in the previous year are checked as planned and suspicion-based checks are carried out.

Article 68 of Regulation (EC) No 1107/2009 concerning the placing of plant protection products on the market and repealing Directives 79/117/EEC and 91/414/EEC requires each Member State to submit annually to the Commission a report on official control measures concerning the placing on the market and use of plant protection products. Austria's annual reports are publicly available on Landnet at http://www.landnet.at (search for control reports on plant protection products) and on the homepage of the European Commission.

The annual plan of inspection shall specify the number of sampling and/or conformity checks, the number of establishments to be inspected and the checks to be carried out. The planned figures are used to determine random samples and to take account of follow-up activities due to infringements from previous periods and capacities for ad-hoc activities.

The stated planned figures regarding sampling and/or conformity checks as well as the plants to be inspected and the plant inspections to be carried out and the implementation of the inspection plan were determined in agreement with the organisational units concerned, so that it can be assumed that resources will be available for planning purposes.

The BAES Annual Control Report provides an overview of the control activities carried out by the Plant Protection Products Division from page 3 onwards. The representation contains the results in analogy to the fixed planning and therefore gives information about:

• Number of lots or batches checked by sampling and/or conformity checks and number of establishments checked and checks carried out,
• the main focuses set on the basis of current issues, and
• measures taken in relation to the results of control activities