Washington, Oct. 5 - Experimental genetically modified organisms have managed on two separate cases to enter the commercial U.S. rice supply, but U.S. Department of Agriculture officials said Friday they don't know how, even after an extensive investigation.
"Investigators had hoped to identify how each (genetically engineered) rice line entered the commercial rice supply, but the exact mechanism for introduction could not be determined in either instance," the USDA said in a statement.
In the first case, the USDA revealed in August 2006 that traces of the unapproved biotech Liberty Link Rice 601 - a product being developed by Bayer CropScience, a division of Bayer AG (BAYRY) - somehow made it into supplies of the non-biotech cheniere rice.
In March 2007, the USDA announced the second case: Another unwanted presence of an unapproved biotech trait had moved from test plots to commerce. Traces of Bayer's biotech Liberty Link 604 were found mixed in BASF AG's (BASFY) non-biotech Clearfield CL131 rice.
Both of the experimental LL 601 and LL 604 rice seeds were being developed at Louisiana State University's Rice Research Station in Crowley, La., under contract by Bayer, according to Cindy Smith, administrator of the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
In the case of the Clearfield contamination with LL 604, Smith said, investigators ruled out the possibility of cross pollination between experimental and non-experimental crops because the two weren't grown during the same time period at the Louisiana research facility. That means, she said, the contamination likely came from some type of post-production mixing - perhaps due to erroneous seed labeling.
The cheniere contamination with LL 601, however, could have been a case of cross-pollination, because they were both grown at the same time in the same place at the LSU research site in 1999, 2000 and 2001, Smith said.
The extensive USDA investigation not only failed to show how the two experimental biotech lines of rice got into commercial supplies, but also offered an unclear picture of how much of each made it into commercial crops.
The USDA investigators said they could only confirm that cheniere foundation rice seed was contaminated in 2003 with LL 601. Cheniere rice seeds produced in 2005 and 2006 tested positive for genetically modified organisms, but the USDA didn't specify which ones in the report released Friday.
Even less was revealed in the report about the extent of distribution for the LL 604-contaminated Clearfield rice.
Most of the USDA's failure to nail down how the two biotech contaminations occurred and how much of the seeds were released into production fields is due to poor documentation, Smith said.
She stressed to reporters that "records that might have been pertinent had not been maintained and were not available to investigators."
And because of the lack of evidence, the USDA said in a statement, it will "not be pursuing any enforcement action against Bayer CropScience or its cooperators.
Rice farmers in the U.S., though, are not satisfied with just the USDA's investigation and want to ensure that no more biotech seeds are inadvertently allowed into commerce, according to the group USA Rice Federation.
"Given the lack of meaningful explanation by APHIS into what caused the Liberty Link (LL) traits to be in the U.S. supply, the push by the USA Rice Federation for uniform testing of U.S. rice and the aggressive promulgation of a seed plan to eliminate the LL traits from the U.S. commercial supply were the right things to do," the group's chairman, Al Montna, said in a statement.