Bayer needs to shed more businesses to gain approval from the Canadian Competition Bureau and from the United States Justice Department for its $97-billion takeover of Monsanto.
Bayer said with these decisions, it is now close to completing the deal. It has approvals from China, Brazil and Australia, but not Canada.
BASF, another German company, will pay $5.9 billion for canola, soybean, vegetable seed, herbicide and seed-treatment businesses as part of the agreements.
The Canadian Competition Bureau said it will now review the suitability of BASF as a buyer.
The deal with Monsanto makes Bayer the world’s largest supplier of pesticides and seeds.
But the U.S. Justice Department’s agreement has knocked down some of the stock-market value of Bayer shares because the company has conceded it will not be able to achieve the full measure of efficiencies it announced earlier.
BASF and Bayer made a $7.4-billion deal earlier to satisfy European Union anti-trust regulators, but the U.S. asked for more.
The Bayer-Monsanto deal is one of three. Dow Chemical merged with DuPont-Pioneer and China National Chemical Corp. bought Syngenta.
