Brazil's health regulator ANVISA has added the herbicide active ingredient metproxybicyclone (metproxibiciclona in Portuguese) to its official list of regulated pesticide ingredients, a required step in the registration of a herbicide that Syngenta wants to sell in Brazil's soybean and cotton belt.
ANVISA signed the decision on 16 September 2026 and published it in the official gazette on 18 September, together with the substance's monograph on its toxicology and safety, now open for public consultation, according to the Brazilian regulatory tracker Atlas Público. The listing followed a public consultation that ran from March to May 2026.
Metproxybicyclone was developed at Syngenta's Jealott's Hill research centre in the UK and is sold under its VIRESTINA technology platform. The Herbicide Resistance Action Committee and the Weed Science Society of America class it as a new subclass of ACCase inhibitors, the first since pinoxaden in 2006, according to Syngenta's technical material as reported by the trade journal Revista Cultivar. It targets grass weeds in soybean and cotton that have become resistant to glyphosate and clethodim, two of the most widely used herbicides in South American row crops.
Syngenta applied in April 2025 to register Perforze OD, which combines metproxybicyclone with ammonium glufosinate, for soybean, cotton, oats, rye, barley, millet, maize, sorghum, wheat and triticale. At the time Brazil's environment agency Ibama had granted only a temporary research-use registration in non-farm areas such as firebreaks, with preliminary classifications marking the substance as highly toxic and highly hazardous to the environment; those may be revised as the full application passes through ANVISA, the agriculture ministry and Ibama, the three agencies that approve pesticides in Brazil.
Argentina has already granted a commercial registration, and Syngenta has said it aims to start sales there to soybean and cotton growers in 2026. Applications in Australia, the United States and Canada are still in process.
Photo: James Martins / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)
Source: Global Agriculture
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