Driven by France’s INRAE and Germany’s Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) and Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants (JKI), the declaration announcing the Towards a Chemical Pesticide-free Agriculture European research alliance was officially signed earlier this year and aims “to build a scientific roadmap that will soon be presented to the European Commission, as a contribution to the European Green Deal”.

The INRAE website explains that for nearly 18 months, INRAE, ZALF and JKI have been building a dialogue among European researchers and stakeholders with the purpose of setting a common research strategy.

It says: “Their objective was ambitious: to define a new transdisciplinary and multi-stakeholder research strategy that will allow them to offer solutions for the transition towards a chemical pesticide-free agriculture all around the continent.”

It adds: “Through their network, the 24 signatory organisations have already drawn up multiple common research avenues, such as establishing a better use of agroecological principles to develop disease resistant production systems, exploiting the high potential of plant selection, developing the use of new technologies and agro-equipment, and understanding the levers and obstacles of the socio-economic transition, among others.

“The roadmap being devised calls into question the current research methods by integrating systemic and multidisciplinary approaches. The new methods must reinforce the links between the production of knowledge and the experimentation process, both in the lab and in the field.

“The goal is an open science system, where researchers work closely together with the world of agriculture to implement changes promptly, sharing their work and its results all over the continent, including all types of agriculture, and integrating the variety of climates and soils in order to test the alternative solutions at a bigger scale.” 

For more information:

• Read the full story on the INRAE website here