Drawing inspiration from ENDURE’s Agroecological Crop Protection (ACP) international training course held in Volterra, Italy, a ‘Twin Scientist School’ was staged in Can Tho, Vietnam, in March, providing the opportunity for 23 participants to learn more about the ACP approach, which is seen as providing important benefits for crop protection in South-East Asia.
The Twin Scientist School was organised as part of the ACTAE regional project (funded by France’s Agency for Development (AFD) and ENDURE partner CIRAD) which is dedicated to promoting agroecological principles and practices in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar and Vietnam. The organisers of the school note: “Crop protection has relied for a long time on agrochemicals but is now at a defining moment. Although pesticides have been condemned for many years, the problems encountered with this type of crop protection are becoming more frequent and acute: inefficiency in many situations; resistance to pesticides; soil, water, and air pollution; hazards to human health; and loss in biodiversity.”
Agroecology has been identified as an appropriate and relevant way to meet the challenge of moving from a chemical-based approach to more balanced and sustainable agroecosystems and to meet both current challenges (in particular the socio-economic viability of stakeholders) and those in the future (in particular designing and implementing sustainable agroecosystems). ACP seeks to capitalise on the services provided by functional biodiversity both above and below ground, focusing on enhancing both plant and animal biodiversity and soil health.
Co-organised by CIRAD, Can Tho University and INRA, the five-day school was designed to offer participants a better knowledge and understanding of the concepts of ACP, introduce methods and tools for its implementation and encourage discussions to create a collective ACP dynamic and develop collaborations as well as research projects with concrete deliverables, videos, articles and training resources.
The school included lectures on ACP, explaining the principles and examples of its successful employment, lectures and group work on modelling, a field visit, an examination of ACP research topics and case studies (banana, rice and mango, for example) and a final day drawing conclusions. Some of the take-home messages from the participants included the fact that ACP can be applied in the future in the region, qualitative modelling is a very useful approach for considering ‘complexity’, interdisciplinarity will be necessary to develop ACP and that soil health and biodiversity are the two main axes of ACP.
Participants also identified some future challenges such as the links between ACP concepts and policies and improving the connection between soil health and biodiversity. Some actions and themes discussed during the school will be the focus of participants’ research work, including topics such as biodiversity, soil health, sanitation, augmentorium use, conservation biological control, cover crops, modelling, qualitative modelling, bioagents and organic agriculture.
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