FMC Inks Two Separate Deals To Serve The Biological Crop Protection Market

(RTTNews) - FMC Corporation(FMC), a diversified chemical company, Monday said it signed an exclusive and global collaboration agreement with a biosciences company, Chr. Hansen, to develop and commercialize biological crop protection products. FMC also said it acquired the Center for Agricultural and Environmental Biosolutions or CAEB, a division of North Carolina-based RTI International, specializing in sustainable agriculture research. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The chemical company said that the two deals form a platform for serving the fast-growing biological crop protection market.

FMC and Chr. Hansen have already worked on several projects and through this deal, Chr. Hansen will provide scouting, screening, scale up and fermentation manufacturing expertise while FMC will provide scouting, screening, formulation capabilities, product development and registration experience, and global market access. The existing collaboration between the two companies will yield the Brazilian launch of the Nemix C product for use in sugarcane in late 2013, targeting the biggest sugarcane market in the world of 9 million hectares.

FMC's next deal with CAEB will provide the company a proprietary discovery and development platform through the well equipped research facilities. CAEB is a research effort with a comprehensive discovery platform focused on endophytic microbes and their plant-host interactions.