Durable strategies for fungicides use: lessons from the past and leads for improving the future Preliminary results from the FONDU project
Résumé
The durability of strategies aiming to delay fungicide resistance evolution in populations of plant fungi relies on the skillful deployment in time and space of the various molecules registered for a specific usage. Therefore, the optimization of these strategies constitutes a major challenge of integrated pest management, all the more in the context of new regulations aiming to decrease pesticide use (e.g. in France, the “Ecophyto II” and “Agroécologie” plans). The respective interests and drawbacks of anti-resistance strategies (namely mixture, alternation, mosaic and dose modulation) are a matter of debate in the scientific community and should be more efficiently deployed in agricultural landscapes. In this context, this paper reports the preliminary results of the FONDU project, aiming at (1) identifying and characterizing sustainable anti-resistance strategies and (2) disentangling the social and economic imits to their wide use on large territories. This project has a generic outcome but was first focused on Zymoseptoria tritici, the causal agent of septoria leaf blotch. Empirical data (e.g. the pluriannual dataset “Performance”, managed by the technical institute Arvalis-Institut du Végétal), as well as a specific model were mined to answer the first objective. Interviews with key French resistance managers, as well as economic models were carried to answer the second aim.