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Bayer plans to lead Latin America soybean market in six years

Bayer CropScience had intense movement of acquisitions in the soybean market in Latin America in the last four years. The company has identified and acquired company which had germplasm banks to be adapted to the main oilseed producing regions in Brazil and Argentina.

"Now, a more interesting task will come that is to take advantage of this material and start to create new varieties by introducing new genes", said Marc Reichardt, global leader of operations at Baye. "We want to be 'the' soybean company in Brazil and Argentina". He admits the company still has "very little" in soybean market, but the target is to be leaders by 2020 along with Monsanto and Syngenta.

For the year 2016, Bayer CropScience will launch Credenz soybeans in Brazil, the company’s first global soybean seed brand and has already been sold in US . The variety contains the Liberty Link (LL) gene - which intends to be an alternative to Monsanto's technology Roundup Ready (RR) on the issue of tolerance to herbicides. The trait Liberty Link is already approved by Brazil's National Technical Commission of Biosecurity (CTNBio) since 2010. However, this gene was not yet introduced in any of Bayer's soybean commercial variety because China still did not approve the technology.

In the meantime, Bayer already sells a diverse portfolio of soybean seeds of the acquired companies. Besides, it brings its own cultivars developed through conventional genetic improvement.

The company intends to open five new research units that will be located in the states of Mato Grosso, Tocantins, Goiás, Paraná, and Rio Grande do Sul. "We are consolidating these units and already have some under construction", noted by Reichardt.