Francois Serneels became fascinated with China, when he read The Blue Lotus by his compatriot Herge, the Belgian comic writer famed for his The Adventures of Tintin series.

The book, published in the mid-1930s, satirizes common European misconceptions about China as well as criticizing the brutality of the then Japanese invaders.

It was the first book Serneels had read about China.

"Visiting China was a childhood dream," says Serneels, quality and environment manager of the Center for Agronomy and Agro-industry of the Province of Hainaut, CARAH, in southern Belgium. "I always wanted to visit China."

His long-awaited first trip to Asia came in his second college year in 1980 when he visited India, and in 1984 he went to work in Thailand for two years, telling himself that he was halfway to China.

However, it would not be for another 15 years before he would finally set foot in China.

Serneels, who turned 64 on Dec 26- a birthday he notes coincides with that of Chairman Mao Zedong- has visited China more than 60 times conducting agricultural technology exchanges and, more specifically, to help Chinese farmers fight potato late blight disease.

It all started when Serneels came across an advertisement in a Belgian agricultural journal in 1999 about organizing a delegation from the Wallonia region to attend an international agricultural exhibition in China. He learned by chance that an international conference on plant protection would be held there a week earlier, so it seemed perfect for him to attend the two events, with airfare and hotel rooms both covered.

Serneels, then director of a CARAH training farm, presented the technique of an early warning system to control potato late blight, a serious potato disease that caused huge yield and quality losses for potato crops in China and many other developing countries.

"To my surprise, a lot of Chinese agronomists were very interested," he says. He then realized that he had been wrong to think that the potato was just a Western staple. In fact China was - and remains - the world's biggest potato producer.

In fact most potatoes are grown in Asia, Serneels says. China produces more than 90 million metric tons of them a year, about a quarter of the world's total, while India trails with some 50 million tons.

He made some China contacts during his first trip and within a few months began receiving Chinese delegations in Belgium. Several months later he returned to China on his second trip.

It was a trip to the remote countryside in Chongqing municipality in Southwest China at a time when some farmers being relocated because of the Three Gorges Dam were learning how to grow potatoes as their new crop, but potato late blight that destroys the plant was a serious problem.

Food security

"It was a question of food security for the people," Serneels says.

With a new Chinese friend, Che Xingbi, an agronomist from Chongqing, Serneels started to introduce and set up an early warning system for potato late blight. It first started on a small scale in Wuxi, an underdeveloped mountain county in Chongqing. Now the early warning system covers more than 14 Chinese provinces, the aim being to help prevent late blight and increase yield.

In having Che as a friend and colleague Serneels feels particularly blessed. They have been connecting with each other every week for more than 20 years now, he says.

He has made frequent trips to China over the past 20 years, sometimes three and four times a year, bringing with him other Belgian agronomists as well as his students.

He has been busy training local Chinese technicians on the early warning system for potato late blight as well as on the latest techniques for growing potatoes.

"We are the sparks, and the engines are the Chinese agronomists," he says of the work by Chinese technicians to popularize the technique across China.

Serneels says he is unable to speak for all of China, but in the areas he has visited he has seen great attention being paid to potato cultivation in the years since he first came to the country. Farmers are now more willing to invest in growing potatoes thanks to their newly gained ability to control potato late blight, he says.

"It helps farmers to make great progress, and it's very important."

Despite the huge progress, Serneels says, the potato yield in China is still low by European standards.

He attributes this to the fact that the potato is a "technical crop".

"If you grow potatoes without any scientific management you make several big mistakes," he says.

One problem is balanced fertilization. For example, too much nitrogen will produce a lot of leaves but not enough tubes, he says. The other is late blight, which is still a problem in some parts of China and can destroy a crop in just two or three weeks. The third is to ensure seed quality to grow healthy and strong potatoes.

Producing healthy seed potatoes can be rather complicated, and work is done in the laboratory to get a seed potato uninfected with a virus.

To achieve that, technicians cut the very end of the sprout that is uninfected. They then put it in a medium to grow in the laboratory into a small plant, called a microtuber.

"The technique is widely used in China, but not used by all the farmers," he says, adding that many Chinese farmers are unaware of this technique.

Serneels says that the next big challenge for Chinese potato farmers is balanced fertilization, which he says is a weak part of the country's potato production.

He underlines how important potato is as a crop for arid regions such as Ningxia and Gansu and mountain regions in Guizhou, Yunnan, Sichuan and Shaanxi provinces.

"If potatoes are not growing well, people go hungry."

Unlike rice, potatoes can grow on relatively arid land because they require less water and do not require flat land, as is the case with paddy fields.

Serneels says he has been amazed by the ways that Chinese eat potatoes. During his first trip to China in 1999 he met a Chinese agronomist who wrote a book on the 300 ways Chinese eat potatoes.

"They are very different to what we have in Europe," he says.

He described some Chinese potato dishes as very good, but he does not think many Europeans would appreciate french fries being dipped in sugar, as some Chinese do. And of course Belgians are proud of their famous fries, the nation's favorite snack food.

Because of his outstanding contribution Serneels was awarded the Chongqing Friendship Award by the Chongqing municipal government in 2015. He was named by the Chinese government in 2018 as one of the 40 Most Influential Foreign Experts During 40 Years of China's Reform and Opening Up.

At the Chinese embassy in Brussels in November 2022 he received the Chinese Government Friendship Award. Receiving the award with him were two of his compatriots, Johan Erauw, an emeritus professor of law at Ghent University, and Jacques Crommen, an emeritus professor at the University of Liege known for his work on traditional Chinese medicine.

As Serneels has contributed to the fight against potato late blight over the years, he has witnessed the transformation the country has gone through. Buffalos plowing farm fields, a scene that was ubiquitous when he first visited the country, is hard to find these days, he says, because these animals have been replaced by micro-tractors.

Twenty years ago, he says, lights were the only thing that consumed electricity for farmers. Now every household is equipped with many appliances, from electric fans and refrigerators to TV sets and computers, to make life more comfortable.

By contrast, in many villages that he has visited in India there has been little change over the years, he says.

"I see the same misery," he says, including people starving and some even sleeping under bridges.

"That's something you don't see in China."

Serneels gives China great credit for the way the benefits of economic growth are shared among the population, although income inequality is an issue, he says.

Most Europeans lack access to accurate information about China, he says, and European news media coverage of the country is poor.

"That is why I am very happy to take my students to the field in China because when they come back it completely changes their way of seeing China. There's been a revolution."

It is essential for young people to visit other countries to have direct exchanges with local people, he says.

He plans to bring another group of his students to China, possibly as early as April, and says he hopes to have Chinese students visiting him in Belgium soon.