Plant diseases are increasingly destroying EU trees and crops

While farmers and conservationists struggle to contain previously introduced pathogens, new outbreaks are being detected. According to scientists, the problem will only get worse as temperatures rise.

Infectious diseases don’t just threaten the health of humans and animals.

Plants are also susceptible to new pathogens, and scientists are concerned that a growing number of species could be at risk as temperatures rise and the climate, as a result, carries on changing at an unprecedented rate.

Since 2013, over 20 million olive trees in Italy – a third of its 60 million – have been ravaged by a deadly and hard-to-detect type of bacterium called Xylella Fastidiosa, which could see many more plant species, across several countries, succumb to the same fate.

This is because the insect (called meadow spittlebugs) responsible for inadvertently transmitting the bacterium can suck the sap from a vast range (some 1,300 and counting) of different plant species, including trees that are commonly grown in the British countryside and the crops that feed us.

The list is long and growing, already comprising 690 species across 88 plant families.

Throughout Europe, data shows that while farmers and conservationists struggle to contain the previously introduced Xylella Fastidiosa pathogen, new disease outbreaks are being detected.

In fact, these outbreaks have continued to progress unabated at an average level of 70 a year between 2015 and 2020, despite regulations put in place in 2016 to curb their spread.

Already, plant diseases cost the global economy over $220bn every year, and invasive insects at least $70bn, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.