Monsanto drops plans for GM wheat


Wheat is easily identifiable with particular foods, like bread
The world's first genetically modified wheat is to be shelved because of consumer resistance.
US agri-chemical company Monsanto has announced that it would not try to market a strain it has developed called Roundup Ready.

The company has already engineered the strain to survive its own Roundup brand of weedkiller.

But there has been commercial resistance to the product from farmers around the world.

Emotive foods

They believe that wheat is too close to an obvious food like bread to be genetically modified and sold easily.

Foreign buyers, including Japan, the main purchaser of US wheat, say they are unwilling to buy the GM crop.

Accordingly, Monsanto has decided not to press ahead with its plans to sell the strain.

It "does not have a strategic fit with our overall strategy", Monsanto's northern Europe manager, Jeff Cox, told the BBC.

This is a bitter defeat for Monsanto, and it's a well-deserved victory for consumers

Ronnie Cummins
US Organic Consumers' Association
Instead, the company will concentrate on genetically engineered soya beans and corn, which can be used for animal feeds or for oil - products not so emotive or so immediately identifiable with a particular human food.

Anti-GM campaigners were jubilant at the news.

"This is a bitter defeat for Monsanto, and it's a well-deserved victory for consumers and farmers around the world, especially in north America," Ronnie Cummins, national director of the US Organic Consumers' Association, told the BBC.

"I think it marks the beginning of the end of genetically engineered crops as a major force in global agriculture," he said.

It is not the first time that Monsanto has backed away from marketing a genetically modified food.


It planned to engineer bug-resistant potatoes but came up against opposition from fast-food companies that did not want to get involved in the controversy.

The company also announced plans to close or sell facilities across Europe last October to cut costs.

The centres that were being sold or closed down had been working on conventional crop types, not GM materials.