GB 20817-2006Rules for cotton quarantine (English PDF)

1 Scope

This standard specifies the procedures for cotton quarantine: the sampling, the inspection, the identification of pests and diseases of quarantine significance, and the treatment and disposal of consignments.

The pests that travel with it are the ones that end the crop

Seed cotton, lint, cottonseed, linters and gin waste all carry material that can harbour an organism: bolls, bracts, leaf trash, seed and the dust that goes with them.

Three that matter most

The pink bollworm overwinters as a larva inside a seed and travels in cottonseed and unginned cotton. The boll weevil travels in bolls and in gin trash.

And the fungal wilts, Fusarium and Verticillium, are carried on seed and in soil and plant debris.

An introduction is permanent

Once a field is infested with wilt it stays infested for years and cannot be cleared.

Which is why the quarantine is mandatory, and why it governs movement between domestic regions as well as import.

And why the sampling clause carries the weight

An infestation is rare and clustered, and a sample taken conveniently will find nothing at all.

The rest covers the examination, the identification and confirmation of a suspect organism, the disposal of a failed consignment - fumigation, heat treatment, supervised processing, return or destruction - and the documentation of a cleared lot.

About this edition

GB 20817-2006 is the current edition. It was issued on 20 December 2006 and has been in force since 1 July 2007.

The interval between issue and effect is the transition period. It exists so that producers, laboratories and buyers can requalify products, revise procedures and use up documentation before the new text becomes the one that applies. The date on this page is the official one from the record of the Standardization Administration.

Classification and status

GB 20817-2006 is classified under ICS 65.020.01. ICS is the International Classification for Standards, the same scheme used by ISO and by the national bodies of most countries, which is what allows a Chinese standard to be placed beside its foreign counterparts on subject rather than on number.

Its Chinese Standard Classification code is CCS B 32. CCS is the domestic scheme, a letter for the sector and two digits for the subject within it, and it is the code by which the standard is filed and searched in China.

The GB prefix marks a mandatory national standard. Compliance is required by law within China: it applies to what is made, sold or imported there, and an inspection body will judge a product against it whether or not a contract names it.

How a Chinese national standard is set out

Chinese national standards are drafted to the rules of GB/T 1.1, which fixes the order in which a standard is set out. The document opens with a foreword recording the issuing bodies, the relationship to any previous edition and the technical committee responsible for it. Clause 1 is the scope. Clause 2 lists the normative references — the other standards that have to be applied together with this one, and without which its requirements cannot be met. Clause 3 gives the terms and definitions. The technical clauses follow: the requirements themselves, the test or measurement methods by which conformity is established, the inspection rules that say how a lot is sampled and judged, and, for a product standard, the provisions on marking, packaging, transport and storage. Annexes, normative or informative, come last.

GB 20817-2006 runs to 15 pages in the English translation. What is delivered is the complete document in that order: every clause, every table, every figure and every annex of the Chinese original, with the same numbering, so that a reference to a clause number in a contract or a test report points to the same place in both languages.

About this English translation

The English edition of GB 20817-2006 is a full translation of the official Chinese text, not a summary, an abstract or a machine rendering left unchecked. Clause and subclause numbers, table and figure numbers and annex letters are those of the original, because they are what a specification, a purchase order or a test report cites.

Technical terms are translated against the vocabulary standards of the same field, so that a term used in GB 20817-2006 reads the same way as in the other Chinese standards it is used beside. Where a term has an established English form in an ISO or IEC document on the same subject, that form is used; where China's term has no foreign counterpart, it is translated literally and the Chinese is kept alongside it rather than replaced by an approximation.

Quantities, units and symbols are carried over unchanged. Chinese standards use SI, so a value in the translation is the value in the original document, not a conversion, and a limit read from the English text is the limit that will be applied by a Chinese inspection body reading the Chinese one.

This page is compiled from the official publication record: the standard number and both titles, the issuing bodies, the dates of issue and effect, the ICS and CCS classification. The requirements, limits, tables and test conditions are in the document itself.