By JIM RUTLEDGE

D.C. Correspondent

LEVEKUSEN — Stepped-up regulatory review of the pending $66 billion merger of Bayer AG with St. Louis-based Monsanto Co. has forced the German chemical giant to shed its Crop Science unit to head off the possible rejection of creating another megabillion-dollar conglomerate.

The Bayer sale of its 1,800-worker Crop Science division to another German company, BASF, is contingent on completing the mega-merger with the U.S. company. Monsanto and Bayer hope to close the takeover in January 2018.

The $7 billion sale announced on Oct. 13 was prompted by the August decision of the European Commission to launch an “in-depth” investigation of the Monsanto deal after determining that earlier concessions by Bayer were “insufficient” to ease regulatory concerns about the transaction.

Regulators said they would conduct a closer review of the deal to determine if it would restrict competitors’ access to distributors and to farmers, specifically if the two businesses were to bundle sales of their pesticides and seeds. The Commission set a Jan. 8 deadline to make a decision.

“We are taking an active approach to address potential regulatory concerns, with the goal of facilitating a successful close of the Monsanto transaction,” said Bayer Chair Werner Baumann.

“At the same time, we are pleased that, in BASF, we have found a strong buyer for our businesses that will continue to serve the needs of growers and offer our employees long-term prospects,” a company statement said.

In May, Bayer was forced to agree to divest its Liberty herbicide and LibertyLink-branded canola and cotton seeds business to win antitrust approval by South Africa’s Competition Commission. When the Bayer-Monsanto deal was first announced more than 12 months ago, company officials said they expected intense scrutiny by both U.S. and international antitrust regulators.

The Crop Science assets to be sold include Bayer’s global glufosinate-ammonium business and the related LibertyLink technology for herbicide tolerance, which includes all of the company’s billion-dollar field crop seeds business.

Dr. Kurt Bock, BASF chair, said, “With this acquisition, we are seizing the opportunity to purchase highly attractive assets in key row crops and markets. We look forward to growing these innovative and profitable businesses. It will be a strategic complement to BASF’s well-established and successful crop protection business, as well as to our own activities in biotechnology.”

The handful of billion-dollar deals over the past year, when completed, would place more than 80 percent of U.S. corn seed sales and 70 percent of the global pesticide markets under just three companies.

Farmers and food producers have voiced fresh concerns in multiple media about the pricing power of the merger winners as low crop prices continue to squeeze farm income.

In September, Dow Chemical and the DuPont Co. completed its $130 billion combination to form DowDuPont. And five months earlier, U.S. regulators approved the $43 billion merger of Swiss supplier of pesticides and seeds Syngenta with the state-owned China National Chemical Corp., known as ChemChina.