The winners were chosen from a group of 152 AgTechs across 21 countries that applied following a call for submissions launched by the Institute for the event, which will take place at the end of September in Costa Rica.

In a discussion with the 2024 generation of interns, the Director General of the Institute, Manuel Otero, highlighted the extraordinary professional and personal opportunities offered by the program and committed to further strengthening it in the next year and a half of his tenure.

Massruhá and Otero signed an agreement at Embrapa’s headquarters in Brasília to strengthen international technical cooperation. The commitment aims to promote the exchange of public policies, technologies, and knowledge, with the objective of implementing concrete actions to benefit the agricultural sector in the near future.

With an initial duration of two years, the agreement opens a series of opportunities for collaboration with the INSPER Agro Global program, which since 2019 has been analyzing the vectors of transformation and the insertion of Brazil in global agribusiness, contributing to the design of public policies and the training of leaders in the public and private sectors.

Otero and Fávaro also discussed the organization of the Conference of Ministers of Agriculture – Inter-American Board of Agriculture (IABA), which will be held in Brazil in 2025. The Conference brings together the 34 Agriculture Ministers of the Americas every two years and is the main governing body of IICA. It will be held prior to COP30, which will be hosted in Belém do Pará, Brazil. Fávaro assured the full support of his country in organizing this meeting.

The “Dr. Manuel Otero Inter-American Chair: Innovations in the Agri-Food Systems of the Tropics,” in recognition of the more than 35 years that the Director General of IICA has dedicated to the promotion and development of tropical and temperate agriculture in the Americas