Potato Health - Managed for efficiency and durability – PoH-MED

Potato is a major food and trade crop on both sides of the Mediterranean sea. Its vegetative mode of propagation and high economic value foster continuous exchange of living material, long production cycles, and severe losses to microbial diseases during vegetation or storage. This vulnerability is enhanced by the diversity of the production systems into which the crop is grown, and by changes in the geographical distribution of emerging or re-emerging parasites resulting from climate change and seed trade. Developing sustainable potato protection strategies, with low or no pesticide applications, is therefore a major challenge to improve the economic, environmental and human performance of potato
production worldwide.

The PoH-MED project aims at enhancing the sustainability of potato protection in the Mediterranean area, through three complementary working directions: 1) to infer local adaptations and/or population movements of major potato fungal and bacterial pathogens by unravelling their distribution, polymorphisms and population structures, 2) to develop, and assess non-pesticide control methods (resistant cultivars, plant defense stimulators, agronomic strategies) identified during the project or in earlier collaborative work, and to combine them through a systemic analysis into innovative crop protection strategies, and 3) to disseminate key findings through participatory actions.

To reach these goals, PoH-MED federates a multi-faceted consortium involving public research institutions, universities and agricultural high schools, official extension services and growers’ organizations. It will fill major knowledge gaps by providing multidisciplinary data much needed to an adequate understanding of the changes occurring on both sides of the Mediterranean sea in populations of severe potato pathogens, and will disseminate innovative plant protection technologies towards extension services and advanced growers though collaborative demonstration platforms designed and run by end-users themselves, as well as through academic and practical training of undergraduate students by
participating institutions.