Plant Protection - Good Agricultural Practice – GAP = Use

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) defines “Good Agricultural Practice (GAP)” as "practice that addresses environmental, economic and social sustainability for on-farm processes that result in safe and quality food and non-food agricultural products" (FAO 2003). In recent years governments, grower organisations, NGOs and food industry have developed various codes, standards, regulations and guidelines under different brands such as GLOBALG.A.P., EUREPGAP or ChinaGAP, to define good agricultural practices at farm level for a huge range of crops.

In the scope of approval for active substances or the authorisation of plant protection products terms such as “GAP”, “proposed GAP” or “critical GAP” are often used. All those terms include the idea and background of Good Agricultural Practice, but in everyday regulatory language, “GAP” is mostly used as the short term for the “GAP table of intended uses”. In plant protection dossiers such as the BAD or dRR, the GAP, or the “GAP table of intended uses” is used similar to “uses” and includes all uses authorised or envisaged for the plant protection product, off course according to the standards of Good Agricultural Practice.

The GAP is a table of the uses of a plant protection product, including information on countries in which the product is to be used, crop and/or situation, area of application such as professional or non-professional use, field or greenhouse use or indoor application, pests or group of pests controlled and the developmental stages of the pest or the pest group. Furthermore, information on application conditions such as application rate, application method, timing and the growth stage of the crop have to be provided. Similarly, further active substance and product specific conditions of use information is required such as the maximum number of applications per use, per crop or season, the minimum interval between applications, the amount of product and active substance used per hectare and per application as well as the water volume used for application. Of course, for 3-dimensional crops, the so-called leaf wall area (LWA) concept also needs to be considered.