Wheat grains (illustration) -

Tobias SCHWARZ / AFP

The fourth largest wheat exporter in the world, Argentina is the first country in the world to approve the production and marketing of a variety of transgenic wheat, a new market, however, subject to the approval of the main importer, Brazil.

"This is the first approval in the world" for a GMO of wheat, whose particularity is to be tolerant to drought, the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina said on Thursday in a statement ( Conicet).

But "to be marketed in Argentina, it must be approved by Brazil, the main and historic market for Argentinian wheat," specifies the body which depends on the government.

In 2019, 45% of the 11.3 million tonnes of wheat exported by Argentina were sold to Brazil.

The other main markets are Indonesia, Chile and Kenya.

A drought resistant gene

The development of this drought-resistant wheat is the result of a public-private collaboration of over 15 years between the Argentinian company Bioceres and a research group from the National University of Litoral (UNL).

The latter, led by Dr Raquel Chan, succeeded in isolating a drought-resistant gene to inoculate it in wheat, soybeans or corn.

However, until now, research has come up against the complexity of the wheat genome.

"The Argentinian Ministry of Agriculture has approved wheat incorporating our company's HB4 technology for production and consumption", welcomes a Bioceres press release which underlines that Argentina thus becomes the "first country in the world" to adopt this technology.

The HB4 wheat varieties are developed by Trigall Genetics, a joint venture between Bioceres and the French company Florimond Desprez, one of the world leaders in wheat genetics.

"Non-acceptance by consumers"

Established in the north of France, the Florimond Desprez group (1,155 employees) presents itself as "breeder of varieties and producer of seeds meeting the expectations of the field crops sector".

It is present in 65 countries and has 35 subsidiaries abroad, including one in Argentina since 2012. In production batches and field trials carried out over the last ten years, HB4 wheat varieties have shown improvement. yield of 20% on average in case of drought.

Experts, members of the National Seed Institute, however expressed their concern about this marketing approval.

They stressed in a forum this Thursday that no country approved the use of transgenic wheat varieties "due to the non-acceptance by local and / or foreign consumers of products made from transgenic crops and the difficulty of separating the production of GMOs and that of non-GMOs ”.

They also indicated that eventual approval by the Brazilian government “does not guarantee that mills, bakeries and individual consumers will agree to purchase our GMO wheat, and if they do, there is no guarantee that 'they will do it without price reduction'.

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