ENDURE’s Danish partners, SEGES and Aarhus University, have completed a report detailing the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) implementation efforts made in seven neighbouring countries with broadly similar growing conditions. In addition to the original Danish version, the report has now been translated into English and a French version is available from France’s IPM portal, EcophytoPIC.
Danish experts gathered information from France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and the UK, in addition to outlining their own efforts. Questionnaires included themes such as the production of crop specific guidelines, the use of websites and IPM demonstration farms, the IPM consultancy offered to farmers, the use of experience exchange groups and training or in-training provision.
The Danish team used this information as the basis for discussing and inspiring Denmark’s IPM task force, chaired by the country’s Environmental Protection Agency, and produce proposals for future IPM efforts.
Under the Sustainable Use Directive (Directive 2009/128/EC) all European Union Member States are required to implement the eight principles of IPM in their National Action Plans, but the Danish report reveals that they have different ways of achieving this.
Taking the example of the production of crop specific guidelines (mentioned in the Directive), the UK had not done so, while Denmark alongside most countries prepared relatively brief guidelines addressing advisers and producers directly. Germany, on the other hand, brought all stakeholders together for each crop and prepared an extensive report per crop, which was then evaluated by scientists.
There is a different approach to demonstration farms, too. Funded by an environmental tax, France has created a network of more than 2,000 of these demonstration farms, which in addition are producing lots of data which is proving useful to researchers. At the time of the questionnaire, Germany had 66 demo farms, on which intensive monitoring of pests was conducted. In Ireland, three demonstration farms have been established for trials and research activities, while Sweden has no new demo farms specifically for IPM but has similar long-term activities under its Odling i Balans (‘Cultivation in Balance’) programme.
“All our neighbouring countries work in different ways with efforts aimed at making agriculture less dependent on pesticides,” note the authors. “It is our impression that the activities were very much chosen considering the organisation of advisory service and research activities in the individual countries, i.e. the IPM efforts in many cases built on activities and competences that were already supported and aiming at developing novel crop protection methods.”
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