Save the date: A seminar to discuss on Plant and One Health will take place in Lleida on 28th November

Nov 10, 2023

On 28 November from 11:00 to 14:00 the conference “Plant Health and One Health” will be held at the Agrofood, Forest and Veterinary Campus in Lleida on the occasion of the presentation of the book La Sanidad Vegetal en la Agricultura y la Silvicultura: Retos y Perspectivas para la Próxima Década (Plant Health in Agriculture and Forestry: Challenges and Perspectives for the Next Decade), a publication edited by the Real Academia de Ingeniería and supported by Agrotecnio-CERCA. It is available on this link.

The book was written by Rafael M. Jiménez-Díaz (UCO-IAS-CSIC), María Milagros López (IVIA) and Ramon Albajes (UdL-Agrotecnio), three agricultural engineers with expertise in different areas of plant health. Albajes, researcher, advisor and former director of Agrotecnio, specialises in the ecology and control of agricultural pests.

Plant health plays a key role in improving food security, protecting the environment and biodiversity, and also in boosting economic development. It contributes to increasing agricultural and forestry productivity by reducing crop losses caused by pests, diseases and weeds with increasingly sustainable technology.

This conference is part of a series of sessions to present the book that began in Madrid last June in the Real Academia de Ingeniería and continued in October at the University of Cordoba. Each session focuses on a different topic, and the Lleida session will focus on the concept of One Health, which has gained prominence in recent decades due to human population growth, climate change and the increased movement of people, animals and food, as Ramon Albajes himself pointed out at the event in Cordoba, noting that “60% of the pathogens that cause human diseases have their origin in domestic and wild animals, and 75% of emerging infectious human diseases have an animal origin“. This is the case, for example, of the pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

At the meeting to be held in Lleida, nine speakers from various universities and research centres, including three CERCA centres as well as Agrotecnio, will present different aspects that affect the so-called One Health from the point of view of plant, animal, human and environmental health.

The full programme is available here. To participate, please register using this form. In addition, the event will be streamed live on Agrotecnio’s YouTube channel. If you are following the event online, registration is not required.

More info

Hoffmann V., Paul B., Falade T., Moodley A., Ramankutty N., Olawoye J., Djouaka R., Lekei E., de Haan N., Ballantyne P., Waage J. (2022). A one health approach to plant health. CABI Agriculture and Bioscience, 19, 3:62