A decline in crop research is having a negative impact on disease resistance in the UK fresh produce industry according to a study released last week.

The 'Audit of Plant Pathology Education and Training in the UK', published by the British Society for Plant Pathology (BSPP), reports of a serious decline in teaching and research on plant diseases within Britain's higher education system.

According to the study, plant pathology is currently lost or greatly reduced at 11 British universities and colleges, and fewer than half the UK institutions that teach biology, agriculture or forestry offer a course in plant pathology.

Professor James Brown, president of the BSPP, says that only one in seven universities now provide students with hands-on, practical classes about plant disease.

“New diseases continue to threaten our woodlands and our food crop so plant pathology education in Britain needs to be revived, to reverse the decline in expertise and to give farmers and foresters better ways of controlling these diseases,' explained Brown.

Brown added that job losses of plant pathology lecturers at Warwick University and Imperial College, London, are in line with a nationwide decline.

“As globalisation and changes in the climate alter the range of diseases attacking our food crops and our countryside, we must educate specialists who can react to the unexpected and we must not wait until we have lost existing expertise completely,' said Professor Michael Shaw, from the University of Reading’s School of Agriculture, Policy and Development.

The plant pathology audit also found that British universities have appointed few plant pathologists in the last 20 years with many of those who still remain aged over 50. It attributes the loss of expertise to a shift in universities now supporting subjects which bring in more short-term income.

“All areas of plant pathology in Britain are under strain. We are especially worried that there are now very few UK experts left in diseases of trees and vegetables,' concluded Professor Brown.