IMPOCHA

The project is under “Trilateral collaborative research project  (Belgium – China – South-Africa) and focus on three aspects: health, climate change and biodiversity. 

• The fungicide exposures of farmers and their family (BE and CN) will be assessed by means of a questionnaire on agricultural practices and fungicide usage. Silicon wristbands will be used as proxy for human exposure. The fungicide content in the wristband will be measured and consequent risk assessment will be performed.
• To assess the impact of climate change, growth chamber trials with elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations and warmer/drier climatic conditions, and greenhouse experiments simulating warmer/drier conditions will be used to evaluate the reaction of soil microbiomes of various quality (diversity) to these new conditions.
• The impact of agricultural practices on the soil microbiome will be assessed by comparing agricultural practices including pesticide usage on the microbiome in potato soils (using next generation sequencing). 
• The effect of different agricultural practices on the forage quality (and thus animal health) will be assessed in root cover crops planted after potato crops in the same fields.

Consortium : Sciensano (Belgium); Agricultural Research and extension Centre of Hainaut Province -CARAH (Belgium); Ghent University (Belgium); Hainaut Analyses (Belgium); Industrial Crops Institute, Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences-YAAS (China); International Potato Center for Asia and the Pacific), Beijing-CCCAP (China); Enshi Academy of Agricultural Sciences-EAAS (China); University of Pretoria, Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences (South Africa); University of Limpopo (South Africa). 

Coordinator: Wei-Hong Zhang (ICRH, UG) 
Team Members: Olivier Degomme, Wei-Hong Zhang, Yushan Yu.