As Monsanto Co., which, along with Dow Chemical Co., is the major American maker of genetically-modified crops, runs up against heavy resistance to GM products in overseas markets, the company looks for ways to overcome the barriers and improve its image as a corporate citizen.

One tactic pursued by Monsanto is partnerships with public sector groups – government organizations, non-governmental organizations, and academic research labs – to find socially responsible uses for GM crops.

Incidents like one last April, when traces of a Monsanto-modified canola, not yet approved for U.S. markets, were discovered in crops being sold for consumption, provide opponents of all GM crop development with ammunition.

Last month, Monsanto’s Vice President of Product and Technology Cooperation Rob Horsch testified before a congressional committee on scientific research about the company’s efforts to develop GM crops that could be used to help fight hunger in underdeveloped nations around the world.

Private and public sector programs have been trying to develop biotech solutions to famine and malnutrition for years. But, experts say, developing crops for humanitarian uses is different from developing them for sale.

“It’s not as if commercial products won’t benefit Africa,” said Jill Montgomery, director of technology communications for Monsanto. “It’s just that those products alone won’t bring Africa to overcoming hunger and poverty.”

Many of the people in developing nations that need food aid are small-holding farmers in rural areas, explained Rob Potter, a genetecist for the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project 2, a project of the U.S. Agency for International Development to use biotechnology to improve crops for farmers in developing nations.

Often, the crops these farmers grow are different from the crops raised by more technologically-enabled farmers in developed nations. Potter and Montgomery both cited such weather-resilient, easy-to-plant food crops as sweet potato and cassava -- a starchy root commonly grown in sub-Saharan Africa -- as examples.

Sometimes, Potter said, farmers have “such a deep cultural attachment to a particular kind of crop that changing it really isn’t going to have a market.”

Often, people involved in the effort say, technology-oriented solutions to local problems fall through the cracks, because public organizations lack the funding to pursue them to fruition, and private corporations do not have a profit motive to invest in the research. In addition to the usual considerations that affect the profitability of new products, the relatively high cost of meeting regulatory requirements for GM foods means the profits must be substantial, said Potter.

Without a profit motive to pursue research on such subsistence crops, Monsanto will sometimes compromise by handing over the rights to a technology it has developed to the private sector.

For example, Montgomery said, Monsanto at one point financed research on cassava. When the company sidelined that project in April 2002, it handed over the rights to the research to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, a not-for-profit research facility in St. Louis that was founded with a grant from Monsanto.

“Of course we benefit from public sector activities,” Montgomery said. “We think the general public gets a return on that investment.”