Preliminary announcement of "Ecophyto Maturation" ANR call 2019
The goal of a "Maturation" call for research projects is to promote, through financial support, the valorization of scientific work successfully completed in a previous research program. The purpose of a maturation call is to develop products, technologies or services that will contribute to a technological breakthrough. More specifically, the aim is to encourage consortia bringing together researchers and socio-economic actors (private companies, technical centers and institutes, professional organisations, etc.) to jointly develop research projects aiming at achieving a technology readiness level (TRL) greater than or equal to 5 and proposing a solution with proven operability in response to end-users' needs.
To meet the objectives of reducing the use of plant pesticides in agriculture, farmers and actors of the agro-food sector have identified obstacles, which requires the development of innovative and sustainable solutions.
The first edition of the ANR Ecophyto-Maturation call for projects will open in January 2019 for a total amount of 3.5 million euros. This first call will address the two following topics:
- Biocontrol, including the deployment of strategies such as crop protection auxiliaries, the use of chemical mediators at a landscapel level, sterile insect techniques, or the use of biological regulations provided by communities of micro-, macro-organisms or plants. This call is particularly encouraging projects that incorporate new economic and business models.
- Decision support tools aiming at reducing the use of phyto-pharmaceutical products, based on the characterization and assessment of epidemiological risks to mobilize preventive approaches and taking into account impact assessments on health and environment.
These tools could combine predictive models and networks of data field capture.
The second edition, scheduled for 2021, will address other topics related to impact reduction tools and agro-equipments in the broad sense.
Project will be evaluated on the basis of its scientific credibility, its ability to promote previous research outcomes at TRL levels 3 or 4, the relevance of proposed solution, and its sustainability a priori. Proposed projects should explain means and partnerships contributing to advance the solutions from a proof of concept and / or laboratory validation to demonstrated results in the field at a level ensuring their feasibility and thus paving the way to marketing (TRL 6 to 9). Project will be evaluated in a single step by an independent international scientific evaluation committee based on the principle of peer evaluation implemented by ANR. The final decision will be taken by the call steering committee . Consortia must include at least one "research organization" partner and at least one "socio-economic actor" partner.
The call text will be published in January 2019 and project submission will open in April 2019.
