EuroBlight: Recommendations to combat disease

November 16, 2021

EuroBlight, a potato late blight network for Europe, celebrates 25 years of existence this year and has set out a series of recommendations to continue the work to combat the disease, which comes with a huge cost worldwide in terms of its control and crop losses.

The recommendations were produced following EuroBlight’s 18th workshop, ‘Fostering the sustainable management of early and late blight in potato’, which was held online earlier this year and attracted 120 participants. Reflecting EuroBlight’s support for other late blight networks around the world, the workshop included participants from Europe, South America, USA, Africa and India.

The recommendations are as follows (you can read the full text of the recommendations here):

Recommendation 1: Continue and renew efforts to monitor populations of blight pathogens, their evolution and their epidemiology

EuroBlight strongly believes a pan-European surveillance of populations of blight pathogens is essential for fast reaction to new emergences and optimization of control strategies. EuroBlight will maintain its efforts to serve as a pilot network for the production and use of population information in IPM, and would welcome national and EU support to fully implement it.

Recommendation 2: Assess, develop and integrate control methods into efficient, tailor-made local strategies through collaborative and participatory research

As a long-time actor in IPM, EuroBlight supported the search for as diverse an array of control options as possible, including biocontrol technologies, host resistance, crop/farm management alongside a set of high-performance fungicides. A strong focus must now be put on combining these components into efficient, robust, local and sustainable control strategies; this can only be achieved through multi-actor actions involving key stakeholders along the value chain.

Recommendation 3: Developing a transnational, distributed European infrastructure

Since its inception, EuroBlight acted as a pan-European network, developing initiatives for a coordinated response to the challenges of sustainable control of early and late blights. EuroBlight therefore strongly supports any initiative to establish a permanent infrastructure able to sustain and expand the collection, integration, use and dissemination of data relevant to IPM design and validation, as well as the capacity building in these fields.

Recommendation 4: Fostering global outreach, cooperation and harmonisation

Dealing with major diseases distributed worldwide, EuroBlight recognizes both the challenges and opportunities for a global approach of sustainable crop health management. It is also well aware of the need for increased visibility and accessibility of the data and knowledge gathered during its 25 years of existence. EuroBlight recommends that the long-term efforts to share and develop a global view of the blights issue, but also of the new questions it raises (local versus global management issues, rapid development of information technologies, impact of global warming on pathogen distribution and spread etc…) be fully exploited for the identification of research, development and priority setting, and for the set-up of transcontinental activities improving the lasting control of such major plant diseases.

For more information:

• Visit the EuroBlight website here
• Read the recommendations in full here