Brussels, Oct 16 - EU regulators will decide this week whether to force testing of all U.S. long-grain rice imports to prove the absence of a genetically modified (GMO) strain not allowed in Europe, an official said on Monday.
Earlier this month, the European Commission set a 15-day period for negotiating a common sampling protocol with U.S. authorities to detect the GMO rice strain, which has turned up in the food chains of at least nine EU countries since August.
That deadline expires on Thursday. If no deal is reached, the EU-25 is expected to order compulsory testing of U.S. rice cargoes that arrive at any EU port -- at the exporter's cost.
"We will have to decide whether we have a deal (with the United States) or not. If we don't, we will send the matter to the standing committee (of EU experts) on Monday," one Commission official said.
"If there's no deal, it would be a decision imposing mandatory counter-testing on U.S. long grain rice imports by the member states at the expense of the exporters," he said.
No biotech rice is allowed to be grown, sold or marketed on the territory of the European Union's 25 countries.
In August, the Commission tightened rules governing imports of U.S. long-grain rice to prove the absence of the LL Rice 601 strain, which it said was marketed by Germany's Bayer AG and produced in the United States.
Its decision followed the discovery by U.S. authorities of trace amounts of the GMO rice, engineered to resist a herbicide, in long-grain samples that were targeted for commercial use.
Bayer says it does not sell or produce LL Rice 601 and the strain was developed by Aventis CropScience, a company bought by Bayer in 2002. That development ended in 2001, the company says.