Collection and evaluation of relevant information for the development of a new guidance document on emissions of plant protection products from protected crops (e.g. greenhouses and crops grown under cover) Southern zone
Accepted: 26 January 2011
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Summary
Project developed on the grant with reference number NP/EFSA/PPR/2010/01
In order to develop a new EU guidance document on emissions of PPPs from protected crops, EFSA needed a very realistic picture of the situation of the crop protection structures existing in Europe.
The First Data Collection in Southern Europe provided an analysis of the existing data concerning the distribution of crop protection structures in these Countries.
The Centro Regionale di Sperimentazione e Assistenza Agricola (Ce.R.S.A.A.) of Albenga (Savona, Italy), was charged with carrying out the Second Data Collection. The aim if this work was to gathered more detailed and up-to-date data, by conducting a complete survey at country level. Ce.R.S.A.A. has availed itself of the contribution of a Spanish agricultural services company and a Greek institution: Agricultura y Ensayo (A&E) of Seville (Spain) and the National Agricultural Research Foundation (N.AG.RE.F.) of Athens (Greece).
In order to collect the requested data five Study Regions, well-representative of all the different types of Mediterranean protected structures, have been chosen, in agreement with EFSA, as recipients for the survey:
- Liguria (Albenga area – Savona Province; Sanremo area – Imperia Province) and Lombardy (Bergamo and Brescia Provinces) in the North-Western Italy;
- Sicily (Ragusa, Agrigento and Caltanissetta Provinces);
- Andalucía (Almeria and Huelva areas) and Murcia Region (Murcia and Cartagena areas) in the Southern Spain;
- Crete (Ierapetra area) in Greece;
- Languedoc-Roussillon (Perpignan area), Provence (Nice, Antibes and Frejus areas) and Aquitaine (Bordeaux area) in the Mediterranean France.
The data collection was carried out by preparing a questionnaire concerning structure types and covering materials, the number/year of pesticide treatments and application methods, growing media, ventilation and climate control systems, the presence of pest blocks, irrigation techniques, the methods to calculate the needed amount of water and the quality of the water source.
In order to fill in the questionnaires, the contractor and his partners went in each of the selected regions and interviewed growers and technicians, thanks to the collaboration of their contact points present on-site. According to EFSA’s suggestion, both big and small farms were chosen as subjects for the interviews, so as to ensure diversity in the responses information and to obtain a very realistic picture of the situation of the Mediterranean greenhouses features. On the base of contractor and partners’ knowledge about the territories, all the different structures existing in the Study Regions were described. Each questionnaire was fulfilled with data regarding only one kind of cropping system, i.e. one species under a given protection structure. Totally, 523 questionnaires were collected: 146 in North-Western Italy, 164 in Sicily, 32 in France, 98 in Spain and 83 in Greece.
On the base of Coding Manual’s specification, the collected data were put into a database provided by EFSA, and so standardized and added to the data previously gathered.
Published: 3 February 2011
