19 October 2026, São Paulo: Corteva is building out Brazil as a global base for developing and exporting biological crop protection products, betting that biocontrol tools will capture as much as a third of the worldwide crop protection market within the next decade, and an even larger share in Brazil itself.
Brook Cunningham, Corteva’s global commercial vice president for crop protection, laid out the strategy in an interview with the Brazilian agricultural outlet AgFeed on October 2. He said the next wave of growth in crop protection is likely to come from biological tools that replace or supplement chemical treatments against pests and diseases, rather than from conventional synthetic chemistry alone. Felipe Daltro, Corteva’s president for Latin America, is also involved in steering the push.
The strategy follows Corteva’s move to spin off its seed business into a separate company, Vylor, sharpening the remaining company’s focus on crop protection and the biologicals segment within it. Cunningham said Corteva plans to bring 12 new technologies to market over the next decade: seven new synthetic active ingredients and five biological products, though the company has not yet named any of them.
Brazil’s place in that plan rests partly on how far biologicals have already penetrated the market. Cunningham said about 65% of Brazilian growers already use some biological product, a higher adoption rate than in most other major agricultural markets, and one Corteva expects will keep climbing. Practices and products developed for Brazilian conditions are already being carried into neighboring markets, including Mexico, Argentina and Paraguay, according to the interview.
Corteva has been building its biologicals portfolio through acquisitions as well as internal development. In 2023 it bought Stoller and Spain’s Symborg for a combined value of about $1.6 billion, additions that sit alongside a crop protection pipeline the company values at roughly $11 billion. Cunningham’s comments underscore how costly conventional discovery has become relative to that pipeline: bringing a single new synthetic molecule to market now costs around $300 million and takes about 13 years, a timeline and price tag that make biological alternatives, typically faster and cheaper to develop, increasingly attractive to a company managing its research budget across both categories.
The financial numbers Corteva has reported so far this year give some indication of how the crop protection side of the business is performing while the biologicals push continues. First-half 2026 crop protection sales reached $3.85 billion, up 3.2% from the prior year, while operating EBITDA for the segment rose to $815 million from $731 million.
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