Europe
June 23, 2015

The Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) is being developed by the C-IPM (Coordinated Integrated Pest Management) ERA-Net, which staged an SRA workshop in March, attracting 65 participants from 20 European countries, including C-IPM partners, researchers, policy makers, government officials and agricultural advisers.

The overall objective of the workshop was to critically discuss the overall content and the comments received from the first public consultation, and to collect different points of view to improve the SRA. The final version of the SRA will help set the priorities for IPM in Europe in the short, medium and long terms.

The second draft of the SRA is now available on the C-IPM website, where it will be open for further comments until the end of September. It will then be finalised by December this year.

The SRA workshop began with a welcome address and a brief introduction of C-IPM ERA-Net by C-IPM coordinator, Antoine Messéan, INRA, France  (pictured). The participants were informed about the networking project, its objectives, the activities carried out to date and those to be performed in the next two years. In addition, the C-IPM coordinator also highlighted the IPM challenges in Europe and introduced the draft SRA, its structure and briefly described the methods of the process.

This was followed by an interactive session presented by C-IPM scientific officer Jay Ram Lamichhane (INRA, France). During this session, the comments received in the public consultation and their relevance to the SRA were discussed. More specifically, comments related to the three questions asked in the public consultation and general comments were discussed and/or clarified.

This produced several interesting points, including the need to better take into account socio-economic aspects, the greater emphasis needed for training, knowledge sharing and dissemination of information, and the greater emphasis required on capacity-building and personnel exchange. You can read more in the workshop report, which is available on the C-IPM website here.

An afternoon interactive focused on the discussion of the comments received from the public consultation related to the four specific core-themes:

• Preventive and sustainable pest management
• Alternative and innovative control methods
• IPM for minor uses (MU)
• Pesticide impact and IPM implementation indicators

In this session, chaired by Per Kudsk (Aarhus University, Denmark), four speakers briefly presented the importance of the core-themes for IPM research and development in Europe and also listed the comments received from public consultation to trigger the discussion.

For more information:

• Visit the C-IPM website here.
• Download the workshop report from the C-IPM website here.
• For details of how to make your comments, visit the C-IPM website here.

Website: http://www.endure-network.eu

Published: June 24, 2015