With an investment of approximately $ 90,000, the Agency for Regulation and Phytosanitary and Zoosanitary Control (Agrocalidad) upgraded the rapid diagnostic laboratory (LDR) of Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas, which will benefit more than 50,000 producers in the area that includes the provinces of Santo Domingo, Esmeraldas, Manabí, El Oro and Los Ríos. With this repowering, the laboratory presents an annual analytical capacity for this year of 7,800 samples, with an increase of 3,260 samples in 2023, which means an increase of 42% in the attention of the LDR Santo Domingo. The areas that have been upgraded are animal microbiology, virology, serology, and parasitology, and the optimization of the critical regions, such as entomology and malaria, in addition to the immature insect rearing area. Cuenca has a new Agrocalidad laboratory to control milk quality.

For Esteban del Hierro, Vice Minister of Productive Development of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MAG), this laboratory will be essential for the benefit of small and medium producers of cocoa, pitahaya, banana, among others, as well as livestock and poultry farmers in these five provinces of Ecuador. Patricio Almeida, executive director of Agrocalidad, emphasized that these improvements increase the laboratory's analytical capacity and reduce user response times. With authorities and agricultural sector representatives, we delivered the rapid diagnostic laboratory with upgraded areas to provide quality services. We invested about 90 thousand dollars to optimize time and resources for producers in the area.

The Agency's laboratories are accredited according to the NTE INEN ISO/IEC 17025:2018 standard before the Ecuadorian Accreditation Service with accreditation in 35 parameters, which guarantees the technical competence of the staff and reliability of the results issued. Agrocalidad has 425 methodologies implemented and obtained satisfactory results in 30 proficiency tests between 2022 and 2023.