12 October 2026, São Paulo: Brazil’s health regulator ANVISA has added the active ingredient metproxibiciclona (known internationally as metproxybicyclone) to its official list of regulated pesticide active ingredients. The action is a required step in the registration process for a herbicide Syngenta has filed to sell in the country’s soybean and cotton belt.
ANVISA signed the decision on September 16, 2026, and published it in Brazil’s official government gazette on September 18, 2026. The move adds metproxibiciclona to the agency’s existing list of active ingredients regulated for pesticides, disinfectants, and wood preservatives. Along with the listing, ANVISA released the substance’s monograph, a technical document covering its toxicological and safety profile, which is now available for public consultation, according to a report on the decision by the Brazilian regulatory tracking platform Atlas Público.
The decision follows a public consultation that ANVISA opened in March 2026 and ran through May 2026, during which the agency gathered feedback on adding metproxibiciclona to its regulated list, according to ANVISA’s own legislative database. That consultation was part of the agency’s routine process of evaluating active ingredients before they can move forward in Brazil’s registration system. September’s decision finalizes that step.
Metproxybicyclone is Syngenta’s herbicide active ingredient, classified by the Herbicide Resistance Action Committee and the Weed Science Society of America as a new subclass within the ACCase-inhibitor mode of action, the first such subclass recognized since pinoxaden launched in 2006, according to Syngenta’s technical materials reported by Brazilian trade outlet Revista Cultivar. Syngenta developed the molecule at its Jealott’s Hill research center in the UK and markets it globally under its VIRESTINA technology platform. The active ingredient is formulated to control grass weeds in soybean and cotton that have developed resistance to glyphosate and clethodim, two widely used herbicides in South American row crops.
Syngenta filed its Brazilian product registration request in April 2025, under the trade name Perforze OD, combining metproxybicyclone with ammonium glufosinate, with intended uses spanning soybean, cotton, oats, rye, barley, millet, maize, sorghum, wheat, and triticale, according to Revista Cultivar’s reporting on the filing. At the time of that filing, Brazil’s environmental agency Ibama had issued Syngenta only a temporary registration permitting research-only use in non-agricultural areas, such as firebreaks and utility corridors, with preliminary hazard classifications marking the substance as highly toxic and highly hazardous to the environment under that research-stage designation. Those classifications apply to the research registration and may be revised as Syngenta’s full commercial application proceeds through ANVISA, Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture, and Ibama, the three agencies involved in Brazil’s pesticide approval system.
Argentina has already granted Syngenta a commercial registration for the same technology, with the company citing 2026 as its target date for sales there to soybean and cotton growers. Syngenta’s registration requests in Australia, the United States, and Canada remain in process, according to the company’s public statements on the product’s regulatory status.
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