All the news

• NEWSFLASH: ENDURE conference in November
  

  ENDURE will this year host its second major international conference when it stages ‘Integrated Pest Management in Europe - The ENDURE Network of Excellence shares the fruits of four years’ research with the crop protection community’ at the Eurosites George V centre in Paris, France.

• New training leaflet: the participatory approach
  

  When it comes to learning about Integrated Pest Management (IPM), participatory training has been a proven success in encouraging farmers to introduce innovative and sustainable pest control strategies, say ENDURE researchers.

• Dutch and German leaflets now online
  

  Whether you know them as Kartoffel, aardappels or pommes de terre, growing potatoes is not a simple business, not least because of the potential threat posed by late blight, the potentially devastating disease caused by the pseudo-fungus Phytophthora infestans.

• Social Science Insights examines supermarkets
  

  A new Social Science Insights leaflet has been added to the ENDURE library, shedding light on the role played by supermarket produce schemes in the European food chain and examining their possible role in creating more sustainable crop protection practices.

• DEXiPM: Assessing cropping system sustainability
  

  When it comes to designing cropping systems that are less reliant on pesticide use, researchers have a large array of potentially interesting options available to them. These can include, for example, relatively simple measures such as changing sowing dates or introducing new crop sequences through to the use of the latest technology for detecting pests or plants specially bred for disease resistance.

• Statistics regulation completes pesticides package
  

  The final strand of the European Commission’s four-part ‘pesticides package’ reached the statute book last month (December), with the publication of Regulation (EC) No 1185/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council concerning statistics on pesticides.

• Latest ICPC grants announced
  

  Scientists from Russia, Argentina and Trinidad in the West Indies will be spending three months conducting research at ENDURE institutes after being award grants under the Network’s external mobility programme for International Co-operation Partner Countries.

• EC publishes new pesticides legislation
  

  The European Commission officially adopted and published two key pieces of legislation that form part of the ‘pesticides package’ at the end of November, setting in motion major changes in how plant protection products are placed on the market and how they are used in practice.

• ENDURE to become a perennial structure after 2010
  

  At a meeting in Paris on November 26, ENDURE’s Governing Council (which brings together senior representatives of its 18 institutional members) unanimously decided to create a European Research Group (ERG) that will prolong the Network of Excellence after its European Commission (EC) funding ceases at the end of 2010. The ERG will be supported by in-kind contributions from the consortium members.

• Non-chemical solutions to beat corn borers
  

  Wasps are unlikely to win many popularity contests and genetic engineering has plenty of detractors too, but both offer very efficient ways of controlling a major pest affecting maize crops in Europe.