Doing Biologicals Business in Brazil

Renee Targos By Renee Targos|1 April 2025

With commodity prices low, Brazilian growers decreased spending on crop inputs in 2024, and the crop protection industry took financial hits. Now crop protection companies are dealing with the aftermath through bankruptcies, layoffs, and cutbacks—but there are some areas of hope and growth.

Fabio Kagi, Institutional and Regulatory Affairs Manager for SINDIVEG, an association supporting 23 crop protection companies in Brazil says the biologicals market continues to show growth.

“Biological control products have been in the market for a while now. But only in the past few years we´ve noticed an exponential growth, which can be attributed to a mix society demands, developments in agricultural research, financial investments, increase in products shelf life and others,” says Kagi.

Kagi’s colleague, Soraia Pinho, Regulations Analyst for SINDIVEG, who works in supporting members offering biologicals is noticing the same trend.

“Companies involved in the plant protection products market need to be aware of this market trend. Therefore every company either now offers bioproducts in their portfolio or is analyzing the best moment and products to have,” says Pinho. “How fast this market will grow is now the question, but there is no doubt that this trend is here to stay. There should not be any dichotomy between chemicals or biologicals anymore. Both groups of products have their product market fit in modern agriculture.”

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Amanda Bulgaro works as the Federal Regulation Manager for AENDA (National Association of Phytosanitary Companies). AENDA represents 60 crop protection companies with half the members now offering biological products and other types of bioinputs.

One of the big wins last year for her association was the Bioinputs Law (Law 15.070/2024), sanctioned on December 24, 2024. AENDA, alongside other associations and producers, worked to get the new law passed for expediting bioinput product registration.

This new law opens many opportunities for companies pursuing bioinput product development. The Bioinputs Law regulates industries and growers that multiply microorganisms on the farm.

“The new law will encourage the development of the Brazilian bioinputs industry. The year of 2025 will be a year of hard work with the involvement of several entities that must work toward the regulation of the Bioinputs Law, uniting the vision of various sectors and professionals in agribusiness, mainly from the regulatory and legal sectors,” says Bulgaro.

The Microbial Solution

A part of the Bioinputs Law regulates microbials. Growers creating their own farm-made microbials bioinputs disrupted parts of the market due to efficacy issues.

For Rovensa Next Brazil, the law is an important step in the region’s bioinputs market and crucial to their work with microbials.

The Rovensa Next Global Biosolutions Research and Innovation Center, located in Hortolândia (São Paulo State), opened in 2022. Luis Cavalcante, Head of Rovensa Next Brazil, and Johana Rincones Perez, Global R&D Product Design Manager, lead of team of sales and researchers to find microbial formulations that work in Brazil’s varying climates as well as around the world.

Rincones says the new law helps to establish a standard to build trust with growers.

“A microbe is never a product. A product is a microbe that is stable to use. It has a matrix in which it’s going to be applied and perform in the field,” says Rincones.

“A microbe produced on a farm, for instance, doesn’t have a formulation. They cannot guarantee that the microbe is going to perform because it doesn’t have rigor and testing to guarantee it. This tarnishes belief in our own products because maybe growers can acquire the same species or the same strain of microbe that we use in our formulations, but just because they have the same microbe, they don’t have the product.”

Renee Targos, as Editor of AgriBusiness GlobalTM Direct magazine, leads in content development, event programming, and managing the ABG Board of Advisors and strategic growth of the magazine. Renee’s professional experience covers more than two decades of national and international digital and print content development, editing, and journalism. She received a bachelor’s degree from Southern Illinois University and continued her education with master’s level courses in business administration and behavioral analysis. Renee has served as a board member for several Arizona-based non-profits and government commissions. See all author stories here.