Country: Paraguay
Themes: Strengthening the Business Enabling Environment, Expanding Access to Competitive Contestable Markets,
Cross Cutting Themes: Climate
Anticipated Impact Areas: Quality Jobs, Private Investment
The Challenge
The circular bioeconomy has the potential to unlock economic opportunities and long-term decarbonization in Paraguay. For example, this entails scaling up the production of bioplastics to replace fossil-based polymers, productivity increases in the forestry and wood processing sector, or the export of high-value essential oils or other biopharmaceuticals to the world. However, realizing these opportunities requires improving innovation capacity, better public and private sector collaboration and improved access to mid to long-term finance in a coordinated manner.
Mission
The C-JET-funded project on the bioeconomy has helped spread awareness on the topic at the national level and build consensus on the opportunities that it presents to the country. The grant has directly contributed to the Paraguay Forestry Project through analytical background on the value chain wood and carbon markets. In addition, the project has helped build a platform for a country-wide discussion on the country’s innovation ecosystem, engaging more than 50 government and private sector stakeholders, facilitating three workshops, two live television interviews, and coverage by several newspaper articles throughout the project. The bioeconomy component has generated widespread interest across Paraguay. It has helped initiate discission between Chile’s and Paraguay’s governments on bioeconomy and also brought in inputs from the Colombian government. The findings are summarized in a report, “Bioeconomy Paraguay : Innovation and Economic Diversification,” that underscores the implementation and realization of identified opportunities.