Phytosanitary certificate: what it certifies, who issues it

A phytosanitary certificate is the exporting country telling the importing country, on its own authority, that a consignment of plants or plant products has been inspected and meets the importer’s plant health rules. The model certificate is set internationally by the International Plant Protection Convention; each country prints its own version and names the officers who may sign it. India’s scheme calls the origin certificate PQ Form 21 and the re-export certificate PQ Form 22.

Is a PQ certificate the same thing?

Yes. PQ certificate is the everyday Indian name for the phytosanitary certificate, after Plant Quarantine — the division that administers the scheme and prints the forms. The shorthand covers two different documents, so it is worth saying which one is meant. The certificate itself is PQ Form 21 for goods from their country of origin and PQ Form 22 on re-export. The import permit that a Schedule V or VI commodity needs before shipment is PQ Form 06, and it is the importer’s own application, not the supplier’s. A supplier who promises “the PQ certificate” is promising Form 21.

What it says

That the plants or plant products described were inspected or tested according to appropriate procedures, are considered free from the quarantine pests the importing country specifies, and conform to its current phytosanitary requirements. Where a treatment was required, the certificate records it: the treatment, the chemical or method, the duration and temperature, the concentration, and the date.

The certificate describes a specific consignment: the botanical name, the quantity, the number and description of packages, the distinguishing marks, the means of conveyance. Those fields are the ones the officer at the port reads against the packing list and the bill of lading, and they are where a genuine certificate most often fails.

Why it is the late document

The certificate is issued at the loading end, by an authority, after an inspection that the supplier has to book. It cannot be produced by the importer, cannot be reissued quickly from a distance, and cannot be corrected by anyone but the authority that signed it. The agri commodity import page sets out the whole document set it belongs to, including the import permit that only the importer can produce and the food-authority clearance that follows.

It can expire before the goods ship

Here is the part a desk chasing the certificate early should know, because it changes what “early” is worth. The international standard the model certificate comes from lets the issuing authority put a shelf life on it. ISPM 12 section 1.6:

The phytosanitary security of consignments may be lost after issuance of phytosanitary certificates and therefore the NPPO of the exporting or re-exporting country may decide to restrict the duration of the validity of phytosanitary certificates after issuance and prior to export.

The authority sets that period against the likelihood of the consignment picking up pests before it leaves — the standard names packaging, storage in the open or enclosed, the commodity, the conveyance, the time of year and the pests in question. And an importing country may stipulate its own validity period as part of its import requirements.

So a certificate issued six weeks before a delayed sailing is not automatically a certificate you can clear on. An expired export certificate has one remaining use under the standard: it may still support a re-export certificate, provided the consignment meets the re-export requirements. Otherwise the inspection happens again.

Only the issuing authority may change it

The reason a wrong field on this document is so expensive is that nobody at either end of the trade is allowed to put it right. ISPM 12 is explicit that alterations

should be avoided as they may create uncertainty about the validity of phytosanitary certificates. However, if alterations are necessary, they should be made only on the original phytosanitary certificates by the issuing NPPO. Alterations should be minimal and should be stamped, dated and countersigned by the issuing NPPO.

A supplier who crosses out a quantity and initials it has not amended the certificate; they have produced one with an unauthorised alteration, which is one of the eleven grounds the standard gives for a certificate being invalid. The others are worth reading as a checklist, because most of them are findable from your own desk before the vessel arrives: incomplete, incorrect, false, misleading, conflicting or inconsistent information; wording inconsistent with the model certificate; information added by unauthorised persons; an expired validity period; illegibility; a non-certified copy.

Against free time that typically runs out about eight days before the pack is complete, and an import permit for a Schedule V or VI commodity that has to be applied for at least ten days before shipment, the cost of finding one of those grounds at the port rather than at loading is the whole difference.

Where Docket sits

Docket does not inspect plants and does not sign certificates. The plant protection authority’s officer does that, at the other end.

What Docket does is know, from the purchase contract and the commodity, that this shipment needs the certificate and any treatment the schedule demands; chase the supplier for it before loading, daily, on email and then WhatsApp, SMS and an AI voice call; and read the certificate that arrives against the invoice, the packing list and the bill of lading, naming the botanical name, quantity or container number that disagrees while the vessel is at sea. The certificate that is issued late is a chasing problem. The certificate that describes a different lot is a checking problem. Both are the desk’s, and the second is what import document checks is for: reading each arriving document against the others and against the contract, field by field, rather than filing it and discovering the mismatch at the port.