The European Union’s Minor Uses Coordination Facility is now operational and will be seeking to help EU farmers produce high quality crops by filling gaps in minor uses through efficient collaboration, improving the availability of chemical and non-chemical tools within an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) approach.
Funded by the EU and the Dutch, French and German governments and hosted by the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organisation (EPPO) in Paris, the facility will be hoping to address the issues concerning minor uses identified by ENDURE and Coordinated Integrated Pest Management (ERA-Net C-IPM) researchers earlier this year.
Writing in Crop Protection they set out their recommendations for tackling the lack of viable protection options for minor crops, a problem estimated to be causing losses of more than one billion Euros per year in Europe.
Minor crops include vegetables, fruits, nursery stock and ornamentals, and together have a production value of more than €60 billion per year in the European Union (EU), representing more than 20% of the EU's total agricultural production. However, despite the undoubted importance of sustainably producing such crops, the authors underlined the lack of viable crop protection solutions for an increasing number of minor crops. You can read more here.
The facility notes: “Minor uses of pesticides are uses on niche crops with a high economic value for farmers, but usually of low economic interest for the agro-pesticide industry. This leads to a lack of authorized products on the market for farmers to use on these crops which in turn can lead to illegal uses or to loss of crop production.
“These crops include most vegetables, fruit, nurseries, flowers, forest trees and some arable crops. It is estimated that overall they represent more than € 70 billion per year, which equates to 22% of the total EU plant production value.”
The facility will liaise with all Member States, growers’ associations and other organisations active internationally in the field of minor uses, and will stimulate and support further harmonisation, for example in relation to crop group and pest group definitions.
The facility will contribute to the development of non-chemical and IPM routes to solve minor use problems and, as such, will be establishing strong links with C-IPM designed at finding sustainable methods for solving minor use gaps.
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