Brazil's environmental regulator, Ibama, says it is ready to keep approving biological pesticides and other bioinputs quickly once the decree implementing the country's new Bioinputs Law takes effect, despite fears among farm groups and bioinput companies that the rules could slow approvals, Global Agriculture reported.
The law, Law 15,070, already exempts farmers who make biological inputs on their own land for their own use from registration and fees, but products sold commercially must still be registered. The decree that will set out how the law works in practice is still with the Casa Civil, the presidency's executive office, and has not been published in the Official Gazette.
Answering questions reported by the Brazilian outlet AgFeed on 5 October, Rosangela Muniz, Ibama's director of environmental quality, and Alan Alves Ferro, its general coordinator for chemical substance assessment, said the agency expects to review only genuinely new products once the decree is in force, and will keep assessing products strain by strain, in line with the health regulator Anvisa.
One open question is a proposed "biomineral" category for fertilisers enhanced with beneficial microbes. Ibama says fertilisers are not its business, which may leave its boundary with the Ministry of Agriculture, which oversees fertilisers, to be settled after the decree appears.
Ibama's own figures suggest the feared bottleneck may already be easing. It says its average review of a bioinput dossier takes about six months, half the year the law allows, and that it has practically no backlog. It analysed 167 bioinput requests in 2025, up 74% from 96 in 2021. Muniz also said dossier costs in Brazil are about 30 times lower than in the United States or Europe, which she suggested should make Brazil an attractive place to launch new biological products first.
Photo: Marevarzeamt / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: Global Agriculture
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