Technology does not have defined date to start being commercialized in Brazil
11/30/2022
Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) and Helix, a company of the Agroceres group, presented last week the cultivars of the first transgenic corn event developed entirely in Brazil from a fully national public-private partnership started in 2013.
The new BTMAX comes from a gene of the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) and shows high efficacy against fall armyworm. The transgenic plants are not attacked by the pest, which can help increase the production and productivity of crops.
Approved by the National Technical Commission for Biosafety (CTNBio) in June, the technology does not yet have a defined date to start being commercialized in Brazil. Helix also seeks the commercial release of the event in other countries, so that the material can be planted by producers and exported normally.
“BTMAX corn does not present cross-resistance with proteins present in commercial events that already present resistance breakdown,” said Cesar Camilo, a researcher at Helix.
“We have demonstrated that this technology stands out for specifically using Brazil’s biodiversity to solve, also in a specific way, problems of our pests in cultivated plants, pests of the tropical world,” said Urbano Ribeiral Junior, chief financial officer at Agroceres.
“The Brazilian corn is a commodity; the technology is not. We have a huge potential to become a market phenomenon,” said Frederico Durães, general manager of Embrapa’s corn and sorghum division.
*By Rafael Walendorff — Brasília
Source: Valor International