SMP25004 Building a Dutch-Brazilian bio-input innovation consortium

The market for biological control agents, biofertilizers and biostimulants in Brazil is the fastest growing in the world and offers opportunities for collaboration. The aim of this seed money project is to build a strong Dutch-Brazilian consortium of institutes, universities and companies to prepare a follow-up project to develop new innovations in bio-inputs.

This SMP project is a follow-up to the recent Dutch innovation mission to Brazil in November 2024, organized by the Dutch Embassy and RVO. This mission showed that Brazil is currently the most dynamic and booming market for bio-input and with many high quality research groups and an interesting industrial network developing bio-input products. This revolution in biocontrol and bio-input in Brazil makes it very interesting to build a strong consortium of partners and establish long term collaboration and has a huge potential to benefit the Dutch agricultural and horticultural sector and Dutch companies. In order to build mutually beneficial partnerships, it is necessary to identify partners with complementary expertise. Topics for potential collaborations are production, formulation and quality control of microbials, biocontrol in horticultural crops, development and implementation of synthetic microbial communities and regulatory frameworks. This SMP includes 4 activities to facilitate the preparation of a follow-up project: 1) interviews with Dutch stakeholders and potential project partners by WUR bio-input experts to identify research needs, unique expertise and fields for collaboration with Brazilian partners, 2) organization and implementation of a workshop with all relevant stakeholders in the Netherlands to identify the possible project opportunities and research lines for future collaboration from the Dutch perspective, 3) interviews and a workshop with Brazilian stakeholders and potential project partners by WUR bio-input experts to identify research needs, research lines, unique expertise, fields for collaboration and funding opportunities with Dutch partners and 4) elaboration of a joint vision and action plan based on the outcomes of activities 1, 2 and 3.