Brazil: for Embrapa's chief, creation of the research fund is “phenomenal”

"Phenomenal". That is how the head of Embrapa Mandioca and Fruit, Alberto Duarte Vilarinhos, defined the initiative of the Brazilian Association of Producers of Cassava Starch (ABAM), which studies the creation of a fund to finance research in the cassava production chain. "This is a model that works very well in other countries, such as the United States and France and is a worldwide trend," he added. According to Vilarinhos, public resources for research are increasingly scarce and for this reason Embrapa's specialized cassava unit has been approaching and establishing partnerships with entities such as ABAM and individually with producers for some time. For him, the fund that the entity intends to create would benefit initiatives under development at universities, at Embrapa, at IDR-PR (which took over IAPAR) and other research institutions. In his opinion, with the creation of the Fund, research could be directed to directly serve the interests of the production chain. “The ...