The government accelerates for the initiation of establishing an Integrated Risk Management Framework amongst border agencies

Vientiane, 10th July 2020: The Ministry of Industry and Commerce, the Department of Import and Export (DIMEX) of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce organized a consultation meeting with border agencies from line ministries including Lao Customs Department (LCD) from Ministry of Finance, Food and Drug Department (FDD) from Ministry of Health, Department of Agriculture (DOA) and Department of Livestock and Fishery from Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry under the Lao Competitiveness for Trade (LCT)’s Trade Facilitation Agreement Challenge Facilities Projects. The meeting agreed to cooperate with each other in order to move forward one of the priorities for trade facilitation at the border checkpoints by creating and upgrading risk profiles needed for conducting risk-based inspections by using selectivity module of the ASYCUDA system, the electronic platform used by the customs for processing cargo declarations etc.

In order to move forward the implementation of this priority, FDD who is responsible for one of these TFA-CF projects under support from the Lao PDR Competitiveness and Trade project also organized the kick-off meeting for their CF project named “Developing risk-based inspection capacity for border clearance and establishing Post-Clearance Audit for strengthening regulatory compliance in food safety”. The purpose of this meeting was introducing the history and objective of the project, information on risk-based inspection to the food and drug border inspectors. LCD who owned the ASYCUDA system also shared useful information on utilization of risk management in ASYCUDA system which is the commitment for Laos under the requirement from the World Trade Organization (WTO).