Ministry of Agriculture, Food Industry, Environment and Consumer Protection (MLEUV)
The Federal State of Brandenburg – one of sixteen Federal States in Germany – is located in the Eastern part of Germany. Besides its capital Potsdam, it has three other independent cities and 14 counties. Together with Berlin, which it surrounds completely, it forms the Berlin/Brandenburg metropolitan region, of which there are eleven in total in Germany. Most of Brandenburg’s 2.6 million inhabitants live in the suburban area of Berlin. The GDP of the state was 97 million EUR in 2023, accounting for 2.3 % of the total German economic output, putting Brandenburg in the lower range of the country. Brandenburg is a mostly rural area, but with a varied industrial base including engineering, steelmaking, metalworking, paper production, food processing, petroleum refining, mining, and the production of energy from lignite. The Brandenburg-Berlin region and especially Potsdam is the site of an emerging cluster of biotechnology research-and-development activities. It consists of three public universities, four public colleges and different non-university science organisations, such as Fraunhofer Institutes (especially IAP), Leibnitz-Institutes (especially IGZ, ATB, IHP), and Max-Planck Institutes.
