The FARM Foundation co-finances and co-coordinates the Pretag project
The initiative, launched in November 2022, aims to implement strategies to reduce pesticide use in the South. Coordinated in partnership with CIRAD, the project brings together 14 research units from Montpellier and their partners in the South. Since June 2024, the project has entered its second phase.
The steady increase in pesticide use since the 2000s in tropical agriculture has had a significant impact on human health, biodiversity, and ecosystem health. In response to these challenges, Agropolis Foundation, the FARM Foundation, and CIRAD—through several joint research units involving the IRD, the Institut Agro, the University of Montpellier, the CNRS, and INRAe—jointly launched in November 2022 the Pretag initiative aimed at documenting, testing and implementing strategies for reducing pesticide use in the South. This initiative is carried out in collaboration with research communities from Africa, Latin America and Asia.
Based on studies in five key sectors (cocoa, coffee, bananas, rice and market gardening), the first phase of the Pretag initiative was coming to an end in June 2024. The advisory committee co-hosted by FARM, met in Paris in June to draw up a balance sheet and make an initial quantitative and qualitative assessment of pesticide use, an analysis of producers' constraint frameworks and the reduction potential as well as the associated barriers and levers. Several industry players (Africa, South America, France) were also present to enrich the discussions.
There second phase of Pretag aims to co-construct in the short term, with the various private and public actors, an international alliance combining the technical and financial trajectories of an innovation process for the effective reduction of pesticide use.
To go further:
PRETAG Initiative, Pesticide reduction for tropical agricultures
Find articles from the FARM team on the subject:
Togo, organic farming faces the challenge of financing – FARM Foundation (fondation-farm.org)
Pesticides in agriculture: understanding the issues – FARM Foundation (fondation-farm.org)
