Corteva is turning Brazil into a global base for developing and exporting biological crop protection products, on a bet that biocontrol tools will take as much as a third of the world crop protection market within the next decade, and a larger share in Brazil, Global Agriculture reported. Brook Cunningham, the company's global commercial vice president for crop protection, set out the strategy in an interview with the Brazilian outlet AgFeed on 2 October.
Cunningham said the next wave of growth is likely to come from biological tools that replace or supplement chemical treatments against pests and diseases, rather than from synthetic chemistry alone. The plan follows the spin-off of Corteva's seed business into a separate company, Vylor, which leaves the remaining company focused on crop protection. Corteva plans 12 new technologies over the next decade, seven synthetic active ingredients and five biological products, none of them named yet.
Brazil earns its place through adoption. About 65% of Brazilian growers already use some biological product, a higher rate than in most large farm markets, according to Cunningham, and practices developed for Brazilian conditions are being carried into Mexico, Argentina and Paraguay. Felipe Daltro, Corteva's president for Latin America, is also steering the push.
The company has bought as well as built. In 2023 it acquired Stoller and Spain's Symborg for a combined value of about $1.6 billion, alongside a crop protection pipeline it values at roughly $11 billion. Cunningham noted that a single new synthetic molecule now costs around $300 million and about 13 years to bring to market, which makes biologicals, usually faster and cheaper to develop, more attractive.
In the first half of 2026 Corteva's crop protection sales reached $3.85 billion, up 3.2% from a year earlier, and operating EBITDA for the segment rose to $815 million from $731 million.
Photo: Tiago Fioreze / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Source: Global Agriculture
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