19 October 2026, São Paulo: Brazil’s environmental regulator, Ibama, says it is prepared to keep approving biological pesticides and other bioinputs quickly once the implementing decree for the country’s new Bioinputs Law takes effect, even as farm groups and bioinput companies worry the rules could slow the process instead.
The law, known as Law 15,070, already exempts farmers who produce biological inputs on their own land for their own use from registration and fees. Selling those products, however, still requires formal registration. The decree that will spell out how the law works in practice remains with the Casa Civil, the Brazilian presidency’s executive office, and has not yet been published in the Official Gazette.
Ibama officials, responding to questions reported by the Brazilian agricultural outlet AgFeed on October 5, pushed back on concerns from farm groups and bioinput companies that the decree would expand the roles of Ibama and the health regulator Anvisa in reviewing new products, adding time to an already lengthy process. Rosangela Muniz, Ibama’s director of environmental quality, and Alan Alves Ferro, the agency’s general coordinator for chemical substance assessment, said the agency expects to review only genuinely new products once the decree is in force, and that it will keep assessing products strain by strain, in line with Anvisa’s approach.
One sticking point is a proposed “biomineral” category covering fertilizers enhanced with beneficial microbes. Ibama says it does not review fertilizers and does not consider this category part of its mandate, a position that could leave its regulatory boundary with Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture, which oversees fertilizers, still to be worked out once the decree is published.
Ibama’s own figures suggest the bottleneck growers and companies fear may already be easing. The agency says its average review time for bioinput dossiers is about six months, half the one year allowed under law, and that it has practically no backlog of pending applications. Ibama analyzed 167 bioinput requests in 2025, up 74% from 96 in 2021, a rise officials point to as evidence the system is keeping pace with demand even as applications climb. Muniz also said dossier costs in Brazil run about 30 times lower than in the United States or Europe, a gap she suggested should make Brazil an attractive place to bring new biological products to market first.
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