KANSAS CITY, Mo. (Reuters) – Monsanto and BASF plan to expand their biotech efforts by including a focus on wheat.
The companies said they were adding potentially more than $1 billion to the collaboration they formed in 2007, which already had a budget of $1.5 billion and has been focused on developing higher-yielding and stress-tolerant versions of corn, soybeans, cotton and canola.
Monsanto tried to bring a genetically modified wheat variety to market several years ago but was stymied by objections from farmers, exporters and foreign buyers of U.S. wheat who feared consumers would reject products made with GM wheat.
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It shelved its efforts to develop a herbicide-tolerant spring wheat in 2004.
No GM wheat is grown on a commercial scale anywhere in the world because of opposition from consumers and the food industry.
However, some of that opposition has waned in recent years and many U.S. farmers have said they would welcome a GM wheat variety if it helped them increase yields and profits.
BASF Plant Science president Peter Eckes said increased yield would be a focus for the work into wheat as well as other crops.
“The yield increases that we have achieved together in the field so far give us confidence that we can do more in our collaboration crops, which now include wheat,” Eckes said in a statement announcing the deal.
The companies said they hope to develop a yield enhanced GM wheat for North American and Australian markets, but initial commercialization will occur sometime after 2020.
The joint venture is still on track to introduce a GM drought-tolerant corn around 2012, pending regulatory approvals, the companies said in early July.
The drought-tolerant corn will mark the first product emerging from the companies’ joint pipeline and is designed to provide farmers with yield stability during periods of low rainfall by mitigating the effects of water scarcity on corn plants.
