Written by: Husain Sadeqi, MTU

BBioNets attended the Global Bioeconomy Summit 2026 with a poster on “Why Bio-Based Operational Groups Stay Rare”

The fifth Global Bioeconomy Summit under the theme of “Bioeconomy for Socio-economic Transformation and Climate Action” was held at the Convention Centre Dublin on 20–21 October 2026, hosted by the Government of Ireland during Ireland’s Presidency of the Council of the EU. It was organised jointly by the International Advisory Council on Global Bioeconomy (IACGB), the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) and the Department of Climate, Energy and the Environment (DCEE). Ireland used the occasion to launch BioScale 2030, its first National Bioeconomy Strategy, while EU Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall launched a Biobased Europe Alliance aimed at scaling up bio-based materials, products and technologies.

Over 1,500 delegates from more than 65 countries attended the summit which included 5 plenary sessions, 24 workshops, 20 satellite events and 8 site visits as well as an exhibition covering research, innovation, enterprise and the arts where the BBioNets coordination team from Munster Technological University (MTU) presented its diverse bioeconomy research projects including BBioNets.

BBioNets’ work across Ireland, Greece, Poland, the Czech Republic, Spain and Italy has been asking who hears about Bio-Based Technologies, who can afford the first step, and whether the instruments meant to carry them from demonstration to farm application actually do their job. That question ran through the Summit itself: across the Irish strategy launch and the EU-level announcements alike, the emphasis fell not on whether bio-based technology works but on why so little of it reaches first commercial deployment. BBioNets presented a poster on why bio-based Operational Groups (OGs) stay rare, asking that question from the OGs side. Its finding, that the barriers are administrative and relational rather than technical, is a partial answer: the gap between research and deployment, at least in the farm-level bioeconomy, is not primarily a research gap.

A Summit workshop on 20October took up the action plan published four days earlier by the CBE JU Working Group on Primary Producers, which sets out eight measures to strengthen the role of farmers, foresters and fishers in Europe’s circular bioeconomy: two each for agriculture, for fisheries and aquaculture, and for forestry, plus two cutting across all three, a circular bioeconomy advisory hub to strengthen connections between advisory services and primary producers, and an exploration of cooperative business models supported by workshops and practical guidance. The working group’s founding premise is that primary producers are “only marginally integrated into the bio-based value chains”, and that they should be operators of biorefineries rather than, in its own words, “‘just’ biomass suppliers”. Those two horizontal measures speak directly to the advisory-capacity and intermediary barriers the survey’s respondents reported, and that premise is close to what the survey found about farmer influence in bio-based OGs.

That overlap is the poster’s claim on a summit about scale-up: BBioNets asked administrators across six Member States why bio-based groups do not form, and the answer it brought to Dublin bears on the instruments already in place as much as on the ones being designed there.