St. Louis, November 20 (WNM/Bloomberg) - A former researcher at Bayer-owned Monsanto in the United States was arrested after being accused of stealing software Monsanto had developed to help farmers optimize their crops and of using the technology in a new job in China, Bloomberg reports.

Haitao Xiang had worked for a Monsanto unit which developed software platforms to improve agricultural productivity from 2008 to 2017, the FBI said. For more than a year, Xiang communicated with people in China and was eventually recruited to assume a management position at the Nanjing-based Institute of Soil Science, which is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 2017

Xiang was arrested Sunday and has been charged with theft of trade secrets and remains in detention.

Monsanto develops technologies that increase the productivity of food crops, including corn and soybeans. The company was acquired by Germany’s Bayer AG last year for $ 63 billion. China is the world's largest consumer of soybeans, according to Bloomberg.