Horizon Europe Coordination and Support Action (CSA): Horizon Europe Cluster 6 – Farm2Fork (HORIZON‑CL6‑2025‑02‑FARM2FORK‑09)
Duration: 1 June 2026 – 30 November 2028 (30 months)
Coordinator: Julius Kühn‑Institute (JKI), Germany
Consortium: 17 partners representing public research, breeders, farmers, European networks and policy actors
COLiBRI is a Horizon Europe Coordination and Support Action that aims to strengthen the European crop breeding research and innovation (R&I) ecosystem. Against the backdrop of climate change, biodiversity loss, food and nutritional insecurity, and increasing pressure on agricultural competitiveness, Europe requires better coordinated and long‑term approaches to plant breeding R&I.
COLiBRI brings together key actors from across the plant breeding value chain, including public research organizations, private breeders, farmer organizations, research infrastructures, policymakers and funders to jointly assess priorities, gaps and opportunities for plant breeding R&I in the EU, covering all farming systems and approaches. The project does not fund or carry out breeding research. Its role is to create a framework that coordinates, connects and structures existing and future research efforts at European level.
The central ambition of COLiBRI is to deliver a shared European roadmap and implementation strategy for crop breeding R&I funding, accompanied by a collaborative framework for a future EU‑wide plant breeding network and funding mechanism. These outputs are intended to support developing crop varieties adapted to Europe’s diverse agroecological conditions, farming systems and societal needs.
Why COLiBRI Matters
European plant breeding currently faces several structural challenges:
- Limited, fragmented and short‑term funding, which rarely supports the full breeding cycle
- Limited alignment between research agendas, breeding needs, policy objectives and market realities
- Unequal access to research infrastructures, data and advanced technologies, particularly for SMEs and smaller breeding programmes
- Insufficient coordination across countries, crops, production systems and breeding approaches
COLiBRI responds to these challenges by creating a coherent European coordination framework, enabling stakeholders to jointly define priorities and align investments in line with EU policy objectives such as the European Research and Innovation Strategy 2024–2029, the European Strategy on Research and Technology Infrastructures, the Regulation on Plants Produced by New Genomic Techniques (NGT Regulation), the Proposal for a revised Regulation on the production and marketing of plant reproductive material (PRM), the forthcoming EU Biotech Act II, the updated EU Bioeconomy Strategy, the EU Action Plan for Organic Production, the EU’s Vision for Agriculture and Food, and the forthcoming DG AGRI Strategic Approach for Research, Innovation and Knowledge Exchange.
Core Objectives
COLiBRI pursues three closely linked objectives:
Key Outputs
All outputs will be developed through structured stakeholder engagement and made publicly available.
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