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European Directive on Sustainable Use of Pesticides requires that the people making inspections of sprayers in use have an official license, recognized at national level, released by the competent Authority. In Italy, Authorities responsible of training and upgrading of sprayers inspectors are Regional and Provincial administrations. They make this job in collaboration with research institutes that provide qualified teachers.With the aim to homogenize in the whole country the activity of training and licensing of sprayers inspectors the rules for training courses and the criteria for releasing licenses have been defined by ENAMA. Training courses shall have a duration of at least 40 hours subdivided between theory (60% of total time) and practical (40% of total time).Topics treated during courses are: criteria to apply pesticides, main sprayer types used in agriculture and relative components, test methods and equipment used to carry out the inspections of sprayers in use and to adjust them. The exam to get the inspector license shall consist in: a) filling of a questionnaire with multiple answers (at least 80% of answers have to be correct); the questions are selected among a database approved by ENAMA Working Group; b) oral test; c) practical exam consisting in the complete inspection of one sprayer.In order to guarantee the same quality level of sprayers inspections in the different European countries and to guarantee the mutual recognition of inspections made it is considered necessary to reach in short terms an agreement to harmonize the activity of training, licensing and upgrading of sprayers inspectors across Europe.

In order to guarantee at European level the easy identification of sprayers inspected and to allow mutual recognition of inspections as recommended by the European Directive on Sustainable Use of Pesticides (128/2009/EC) it would be necessary to create a SPISE database enabling to collect the list of the technicians authorized to make inspections of sprayers in use and of the licensed inspection centers. This database should be managed at SPISE level and should be linked to the national databases for getting regular updates.Actually in Italy there is a public national online database (www.centriprovairroratrici.unito.it) that was realized by the ENAMA working group. Only the sprayers inspected by the test stations listed in this database are recognized all over the country.This national database contains also the results of all the inspections made in the different Italian Regions and therefore provides a support for monitoring the inspection activity at national level. Independently of the software used at local level for managing data of sprayer inspections, some key information have to be necessarily provided in order to identify the sprayer inspected.They are the coordinates of the test station, the name of the technician who inspected the sprayer, the name of the owner of the sprayer, the data of the machine inspected, the date of the inspection and its response.