INRA and Tereos Sign Agricultural Research Agreement

24 Feb 2015 --- INRA and Tereos have signed a partnership agreement on Saturday February 21, 2015 during the Paris International Agricultural Show. The agreement, signed by François Houllier, INRA Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Alexis Duval, CEO of the Tereos Group aims to facilitate the exchange of strategic information and increase research and development collaboration on key agricultural, industrial, environmental and nutritional issues.

This five-year agreement covers three priority areas: precision agriculture and sustainable agriculture, animal and human nutrition; biobased chemistry and industrial biotechnology. The agreement extends the collaboration that already exists between INRA and Tereos on bilateral and collaborative research.

INRA and Tereos share a common vision of the challenges faced by major French agricultural and agrifood stakeholders; namely ensuring that agricultural production benefits from scientific and technical advances in order to meet the dual concern of higher yields and lower environmental impact, contributing to food safety and nutrition, and accelerating the development of biobased chemistry, while contributing to local development, improving farmers' income and safeguarding natural resources.

Innovation will be crucial to meeting these challenges both on national and international scales. Bolstered by their shared vision, Tereos and INRA have decided to pool their expertise.
The goal of this five-year agreement between INRA and Tereos is to organize exchanges and collaboration regarding strategic challenges which are of common interest, in particular:
- Identifying priority goals and areas of interest
- Accelerating the development of value-creating innovations in these areas
- Facilitating the industrial development of these projects

INRA and Tereos have been collaborating for a number of years, both in France and around Europe, on projects such as Futurol, which aims to develop and market a holistic second-generation bioethanol production process, and ProBio3, which aims at converting carbon produced by agricultural waste into hydrocarbons. Tereos and INRA conduct R&D projects both jointly and bilaterally.

Finally, convinced that vegetable proteins will be of major importance to human nutrition, INRA and Tereos have joined forces to help create new applications and new markets for them. Their joint stake in IMPROVE, a shared innovation platform supported by France's Investments for the Future program, is one of the most significant illustrations of this belief.

The world's fifth-largest sugar group, Tereos is specialized in processing sugar beet, sugar cane and cereals. The Group also has leading positions in the markets for alcohol (No. 1 in Europe and No. 3 in Brazil) and starch (No. 3 in Europe). Tereos operates 42 industrial units and employs 24,000 people across four continents. In 2013/14, the Group recorded 4.7 billion euros in revenues.

A cooperative group, Tereos unites 12,000 cooperative growers around a long-term vision: adding value to agricultural raw materials and contributing towards the supply of quality food.

The French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) is French public research institute that operates under the joint supervision of the French ministries for research and agriculture. It carries out scientific research and supports economic and social innovation in the fields of food, agriculture and the environment for the purpose of developing agriculture that is competitive, respectful of the environment, regions and natural resources, and better suited to the nutritional needs of people and new uses of agricultural produce.