Europom 2024 – English version

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We met in Belgium, the country of pears, for our annual celebration of fruit biodiversity, while COP 16 was being held in Columbia.

On 26 and 27 October 2024, non-profit organisations from ten European countries aimed at safeguarding heritage fruit varieties gathered at Alden Biesen castle in Belgium to attend Europom 2024. They showed hundreds of varieties of seasonal fruit to the public: apples, pears, quinces, medlars, chesnuts, walnuts and hazelnuts. This article reports on the event, before briefly questioning the COP Biodiversity conclusions.

The exhibition

Europom logo
The international exhibition was curated by the Belgian National Orchard Foundation (Nationale Boomgaardenstichting), co-founder of Europom. Screenshot 25 October 2024, detailed schedule here.
Indoor fruit stalls
The fruit of the heritage conservation organisations was displayed in the castle’s barns.
Outdoor fruit stalls
Next to the barns, external partners sold their produce, here local fruit, and promoted their services.  
Talk in the conference center
Talks were held in the conference centre. Here, Paul van Laer from Nationale Boomgaardenstichting explains “how we can enrich our living environment with fruit trees and shrubs to contribute to a better climate, increased biodiversity and healthier nutrition”.

The surroundings

The Alden Biesen castle is surrounded by a hundred acres of orchards. As we were hosted onsite, we strolled across the estate outside exhibition hours. The orchards are managed with different goals, from fruit production to wildlife discovery. They have something in common: the conservation of five hundred heritage varieties of fruit.

Field with fruit trees
Early stroll in the castle’s estate. In the middle, a big pear tree.
Cow next to a pear tree
The young fruit trees are protected from the animals in the grazed orchards.
Old tree
A centenary tree covered in mistletoe in the wildlife discovery orchard.

In one of the productive orchards, we were shown a harvesting system for large trees. It consisted of a mechanism to shake the tree activated by a tractor, connected to a large branch through a cable. The fruit fell in a tarpaulin unfolded around the trunk and were collected below it.

Person using a hoe to push apples in a hole
Apples on a treadmill

The exhibitors

  • Belgium, Europom 2024’s host country

Fruit exhibition visitors in Belgium are guaranteed to see pears of all sorts. Whilst most of the fruit exhibited at Europom 2023 in France were apples, at Alden Biesen we saw a representative sample of the multitude of pear cultivars which grow in this country.  

Big pear tree
Next to the castle, a big Saint Rémy pear tree, a cooking heritage variety from Belgium. There are pear trees everywhere in Alden Biesen.
Apples and pears on display
Half of the fruit samples displayed on the National Orchard Foundation stall, the biggest of the show, were pears.
Table full of pears
On another stall outdoors. I discovered red-fleshed pears.

Belgium has a long breeding tradition, in particular of pear cultivars. The first significative outcome occurred in the middle of the 18thcentury with the creation of the Beurré d’Hardenpont (webpage in French), still found in nurseries today. ‘We hardly know that Belgium, in particular the province of Heynault, is globally renowned for being the craddle of the modern tender, sweet and juicy pear’, Diversifruits tells us on their website, also an exhibitor at Europom 2024 on the Wallonia’s stall.  

On this stall, visitors were made aware that if ‘diversity originates in nature’, humans are also ‘creators of diversity’. ‘When they don’t just rely on natural evolution and selection, humans intervene by carrying out controlled matchmaking’. This way, ‘more than a thousand Belgian pear cultivars were created’ (see poster below).

Poster explaining biodiversity generation
The Wallonia stall.

The country also pioneered biodiversity safeguarding, which was hit by the modernisation of agriculture. In a 2022 interview (in French) of the head of the Biodiversity department of the Walloon Agricultural Research Center (CRA-W) we learn that it began as early as the 70s. He explained how big a success the initiative has been, thanks to the “enthusiasm” of the Belgian people who contributed to “saving heritage varieties in all Wallonia”. In return, the CRA-W created partnerships with nurseries to give access to the most worthy cultivars for the quality of the fruit and their resistance to disease and pests. Garden owners can therefore plant local varieties to be grown without pesticides and fertilisers. We also learn that the cultivars are studied and crossbred to create new ones which require less treatments in commercial orchards and allow for organic production. The CRA-W collaborate with organisations from other countries and countries such as French Nord-Picardie, to share resources and best practices. Philosophie générale de la création du Réseau wallon des vergers conservatoires, a pdf document in French, allows to understand the full extent the CRA-W’s engagement in favour of biodiversity and the development of resilient ecosystems. They study ‘the sensitivity (of fruit cultivars) to disease in orchards which have been left untreated since 1979’. We therefore have forty five years of scientific research data on ecosystem management without chemicals here.   

"Cultivate biodiversity in your gardens"
A message from the CRA-W to gardeners on the Walloon stall: ‘cultivate biodiversity in your orchards’.  

In 2023, Belgium became the largest pear producer in Europe. One single variety though, the Conference pear, made up 91% of the output (page 5), which is evidence that commercial growers don’t take advantage of the diversity of cultivars available in the country. Research findings on biodiversity and ecosystem management, which provide guidance for more resilience and adaptation to climate change have not been applied by the agriculture sector yet. The simplest example that comes to my mind is that the risk of losing production due to unexpected heavy downpours or late frost during the blossoming of the Conference pear could be mitigated by planting several varieties on the same farm which blossom at different times. 

Poster showing tens of different pears
Some of the pear cultivars grown in Belgium and neighbouring countries. Walloon stall.
The stall of the Limburg province of Netherlands also displayed samples of these varieties. 
  • Other exhibitors

Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Holland, Luxembourg, Sweden and the United Kingdom are regular participants to Europom, recently joined by Hungary. Other countries and organisations occasionally join the event, like Poland and Slovakia which attended Europom 2017.

The French stall
The Association nationale des “Croqueurs de pommes” (“apple crunchers”), co-founders of Europom in 1999 with the Belgian National Orchard Foundation and a German organisation, represented France as usual. The fruit displayed on our stall was supplied by our Nord Pas de Calais – Somme – Belgique (in French) local section. We mentioned that the founder of our movement, Jean-Louis Choisel, one of the visionaries who helped safeguard most of our cultivated fruit genetic resources, passed away in 2024. Europom 2028, which will take place in France, will be the opportunity to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of our engagement in favour of the conservation and promotion of biodiversity, which has never been more timely than today.  
Pears on the Swill stall
Pears are not all Belgian. Here is the Culotte Suisse (Swiss pants), identified in 1600, named after the Vatican Swiss Guards’ uniform and its stripes. Fructus (in French) will organise Europom in Basel in 2025. Their co-chair told me about ECPGR, The European Cooperative Programme for Plants Genetic Resources, which he contributed to as a member of the Malus/Pyrus Working Group, which works on apples and pears. I intend to closely follow ECPGR activities from now on.   
The British stall
I found the UK stall particularly interesting for the following reason: the fruit displayed came from two orchards planted in spring 2017,  therefore from young trees. This is evidence that tangible results can be achieved in only a few years. Europom 2026 will be held at RHS Garden Rosemoor, where these orchards are located, a Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) garden in Devon, South-West England.
The Czech stall
Europom 2027 will be organised in the Czech Republic by the Czech Union for Nature Conservation (ČSOP). Their chair and I discussed the tradition of the kitchen garden. More present in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe, it also tends to disappear in favour of the ornamental garden. To reverse the trend, she argued that kitchen gardening knowledge should be shared within communities rather than counting on intergenerational transmission within families because the older generation who had the knowledge has already disappeared. I found this particularly interesting. It reminded me of how the Orchard Project in the UK train and educate community orchard managers. Some of their educational practices could surely be adapted to address the needs of private kitchen gardens carers.
Person holding a half eaten pear
Visiting the various stalls has been an opportunity to discuss various matters, but also to taste fruit. Here we taste a pear with a delegate of the German organisation Pomologen Verein E.V. (association of pomologists) on the stall of Wallonia.
Person showing pear pips
Now looking at this pear’s pips. 
The Hungarian stall
There were mainly chestnuts, hazelnuts and walnuts on the Hungarian stall, but also quinces. In the red shirt is the curator of the Austrian stall, where many walnuts and hazelnuts were also displayed, as usual.
One of the German stalls
Art was also present at Europom 2024, here on one of the German stalls. This is a picture of an installation of painted dried fruit exhibited at the opening of the Venice Biennale 2024 by the association for orchard conservation Hochstamm Deutchland. 
The walnut stall
There were other stalls in Alden Biesen castle’s barns, several of them curated by the National Orchard Foundation, for instance one on cider cultivars and cider making and one on walnuts, featured here.

To summarise what I learnt from Europom 2024 and the additional research I carried out to write this article, I will say that the experience more than lived up to my expectations. I was really keen to go to  Belgium as I knew the country was playing an important role in the safeguarding and promotion of European fruit heritage, I now realise to what extent it is true.

COP 16

Whilst Europom 2024 proved a success in my view, the 2024 United Nations Biodiversity Conference which took place in Columbia from 21 October to 1 November 2024 unfortunately didn’t live up to expectations. But it is the vocabulary used in its conclusion statement to qualify the relationship between humans and nature that attracted most of my attention:  

Screenshot of a webpage
COP 16 conclusions, Convention on Biological Diversity website. Screenshot 11 December 2024.

‘Biodiversity COP 16: important agreements reached towards making “peace with nature”’. These words puzzled me. Are we at war with nature? It is certainly not the case of the organisations present at Europom 2024, which relentlessly work with nature rather than against it.

I found out where these words came from. They were part of a speech by the Secretary-General of the United Nations given on 2 December 2020. “Making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21stcentury. It must be the top, top priority for everyone, everywhere”, Antonio Guterres said. The COP Biodiversity roadmap is built on this premise.

The problem with this vocabulary is that it perpetuates a simplistic divide between humanity and nature, which we should get away from, anthroplogists such as Philippe Descola say. When are we going to ‘entirely rethink political action and living together in a world where nature and society are no longer irremediably divided’?

Where are we after “The State of the Planet” address by Antonio Guterres at Columbia University in 2020? We all can see that in 2025 “the old normal of inequality, injustice and heedless dominion over the Earth” which he said “we cannot go back to” is coming back anyway. It makes me feel like putting even more work into cultivating our gardens. Anyone interested in our relatively small but long-standing movement is welcome to join.

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