Background
Crisicoccus pini (Kuwana) [EPPO code: DACLPI] is a species in the family Pseudococcidae (mealybugs, sv. ullsköldlöss) native to Japan. It is a pest of mainly Pinus but also other genera of the Pinales. National risk assessments for this species have been done for Italy, UK and Australia (Bugiani and Finelli 2018; Australian Government 2019; Lloyd 2019. EPPO listed the pest as not proposed for regulation in 2019 based on the Italian PRA (EPPO 2021), but it was added to the EPPO Alert List to raise awareness (M. Suffert, personal communication). It has been included in pest surveys in Sweden both during 2021 and 2022 but has so far not been detected (pers. comm. Swedish Board of Agriculture). A pest categorisation of C. pini was performed by EFSA (2021), where they concluded that the pest fulfils all the criteria of an EU quarantine pest that are within the remit of EFSA to assess.
SLU Risk Assessment of Plant Pests was requested by the Swedish Board of Agriculture to conduct a risk assessment of C. pini for Sweden. The FinnPRIO model was chosen for the risk assessment mainly due to its suitability to compare the risk that different pests constitute to a country, which in turn can be used to guide prioritization of resources (Heikkilä et al. 2016).