Numerous practical pome fruit breeding programmes are in progress all over Europe. Inside the European Union, information is given on the main characteristics of these programmes. This review intends to know more about the objectives, the investment in terms of researchers, facilities, money source, and future evolution of the programmes. Knowing the main characteristics of these breeding programmes will promote interaction with each other, cooperation by sharing knowledge and material, and better response to European Calls for Proposals in order to integrate and strengthen the European Research Area. On the whole, the number of breeding programmes is quite numerous for apple scion, about half this amount for pear scion, and very few for apple rootstock and pear rootstock. Other figures about Full Time Equivalent Permanent Researchers, greenhouse and field area, as well as main tendencies, will be emphasized. This presentation has been followed by a round table devoted to a discussion about the strategies to promote inside the European Union, in order to answer the new challenges concerning the drastic reduction of pesticides, the consequences of the climate changes and the need for better fruit quality. To answer these high level challenges, a new European organization must be promoted to develop pre-competitive research on pome fruit genomics and molecular breeding; the European Rosaceae Genomics Initiative (ERGI) could be a powerful tool. The questions will concern how to deliver these advanced technologies to the European practical breeding units (public and private) aiming at answering the general and specific needs of the different pedo-climatic conditions of the European basins of production. A new topic, 'Genomics for increasing breeding efficiency in fruit trees', was finally proposed to the European Commission for the next calls.