Description

This grant program funds outstanding research projects in plant science, agriculture, and food biotechnology, with the goal of advancing sustainable agriculture and food production. Projects must be based at universities or non-profit research institutions in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, or Sweden. The research should address major challenges in plant, agricultural, and food sciences, focusing on fundamental science with a clear strategic vision for improving sustainability. Projects are expected to extend knowledge beyond the current state-of-the-art and may be high-risk; they must be grounded in life science disciplines.

Priority areas include:

• Development of resilient, high-productivity, and resource-efficient plants for food, fiber, materials, fuel, or climate mitigation
• Leveraging microorganisms to improve sustainability across the agricultural and food value chain
• Advancing agricultural, food, and forestry systems for higher productivity, circularity, biodiversity, and minimal environmental impact
• Creating novel plant-, microorganism-, fungi-based ingredients and foods with high functionality and quality
• Utilizing alternative ingredients (e.g., precision fermentation, fungi, algae, insects, cellular agriculture)
• Developing enabling technologies, including data science-driven methods, for sustainable agriculture and food production

Projects primarily focused on livestock, aquaculture, clinical nutrition, pharmaceuticals, or industrial/environmental biotechnology are not eligible.