- Asia’s biologicals sector has plenty of products. What it lacks is trusted field data.
- The Asia Biologicals Foundation wants to give biologicals the proof needed to scale.
- Initial efforts will focus on rice, cassava and cocoa.
As investment and innovation continue to flow into agricultural biologicals, the sector’s biggest challenge is no longer discovering new solutions but proving they can be deployed successfully across diverse farming systems.
The newly announced Asia Biologicals Foundation aims to address that challenge by building the scientific infrastructure needed to generate independent, comparable data on agricultural biologicals, helping move the sector from fragmented innovation towards broader farmer adoption.
The non-profit, science-led institution was announced at the Asia Biologicals Summit 2026 in Singapore.
“The foundation will provide a trusted home for the shared technologies and capabilities but also the leadership and solutions needed to advance the sector responsibly, ” said Joshua Soo, founding convenor of the Asia Biologicals Platform and co-founder of Agrifood Futures, during the unveiling.
“In a way, it completes what we’ve been building. The summit convenes, the platform enables action, and the foundation advances the sector.”
Initial efforts of the foundation will focus on rice, cassava and cocoa, with other crops under consideration.
“The opportunity is not simply to improve what agriculture can produce, but to expand what agricultural systems can deliver,” said Soo.
“By connecting science, innovation and industry, the foundation aims to provide independent scientific stewardship to advance more productive and sustainable agriculture, with benefits extending from growers to wider society.”
‘Science must keep pace’
Across Asia, universities, research institutes and private companies have generated significant amounts of biologicals research and field data.
However, much of that information remains dispersed across individual crops, products and markets, making it difficult to compare results or establish broader industry confidence.
Dr Yvonne Pinto, director general of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), said scientific oversight must advance alongside growing investment in biological agriculture.
“As interest and investment in biological agriculture grow, scientific responsibility must keep pace. Understanding how biological interventions interact with living agricultural systems and their wider ecological consequences requires new forms of scientific leadership and collaboration to guide responsible deployment.”
This absence of common validation frameworks and trusted evidence has created a bottleneck adoption.
“When scientific evidence falls short, farmers bear the risks and uncertainty limits adoption. Without the scientific foundations to build confidence, industry development stalls and the wider potential of biological crop protection remain unrealised,” said Dr Ulrich Kuhlmann, chief scientist at CABI.
Agrifood Futures, with support from Wharf42, brought together a group of scientific and industry stakeholders from organisations including CABI, IRRI, NUS, Mars, Salim Agrochemicals Division and Thai Wah Public Company to help develop the Platform’s initial crop programmes and scientific priorities.
Agricultural scientist Paul Teng and strategic adviser R. (Shyam) Shyamsunder also contributed to the effort.
“Asia’s diverse agricultural systems present both a challenge and an opportunity for biologicals. Building on Singapore’s strengths in science and regional connectivity, we have an opportunity to strengthen cross-border collaboration and generate the evidence needed to advance regenerative agriculture across Asia, consistent with emerging regional priorities such as ASEAN’s Food, Agriculture and Forestry Sectoral Plan 2026–2030,” said Teng.
The question of deployment
Since 2025, the Asia Biologicals Platform has evolved from a regional dialogue initiative into a vehicle for developing multi-year, multi-location field validation and deployment programmes.
Speaking previously to AgNavigator, Soo said that the sector often focuses heavily on proving efficacy before rapidly shifting attention towards farmer adoption, overlooking a critical stage in between.
“Sometimes we emphasise too much what would make a farmer use a solution. Then the onus ends up on the farmer. But I think there are so many things in the middle that we haven’t really considered,” he said.
Soo describes that overlooked stage as “deployment readiness”, encompassing factors such as regulation, economics, evidence generation and distribution channels.
He also questioned whether evidence generated in one market can be confidently applied elsewhere and whether biological solutions are sufficiently adapted to the realities of Asian farming systems.
The foundation aims to help answer those questions by providing independent scientific stewardship and helping institutions connect their expertise through shared research capabilities, validation approaches, data governance frameworks and comparable evidence.
Its work will feed into crop deployment programmes under the Asia Biologicals Platform, with the goal of improving real-world agricultural outcomes and accelerating farmer adoption.
Governance and research priorities will be shaped alongside prospective scientific, philanthropic and institutional partners.
For Soo, the objective should extend beyond bringing more biological products to market.
“It’s not about getting more biologicals into the market. That shouldn’t be the ultimate objective. The objective should be about better performing agricultural systems. When you start with the problem and then backwards, you have that north star to guide you.”