Washington, Mar. 21 - Recent breakdowns in the system meant to keep experimental genetically engineered plants from contaminating the hundreds of millions of acres of crops grown in the U.S. has farmers and import markets questioning the purity of U.S. goods.
Mexico, the largest foreign market for U.S. rice, sent tremors through the U.S. sector last week when it stopped shipments on the border out of concern the U.S. cannot keep its experimental transgenic long-grain rice out of commercial crops.
California's medium-grain rice growers have demanded a statewide moratorium on any biotech field trials to avoid the contamination recently plaguing long-grain growers in the South.
Those contaminations, California Rice Commission spokeswoman Beth Horan said, prompted farmers and millers to say, "'Whoa, this isn't as isolated as we thought and really the system isn't working the way that we thought.'"
California relies on countries such as Japan and South Korea to buy as much as 30% of the state's harvest each year and producers want to keep the experimental crops as far away from their fields as possible.
That's getting harder, if not impossible, to do with so many field trials going on, said biotechnology experts at non-profit consumer groups.
In 2006 alone, the U.S. Department of Agriculture authorized field trials of biotech plants on 185,000 acres across the country. Most genetically modified commodities, whether corn, soybeans, cotton or other plants, are altered at the DNA level to help make them resistant to herbicides or pesticides, but a small percentage are engineered to produce medicines or industrial chemicals.
The discovery of experimental rice in commercial seed and grain stocks shook the farmer community recently, but other crops are not immune to contamination, said Bill Freese, a scientist with the non-profit group Center for Food Safety.
"Given the large number field tests on all sorts of crops and the large size of many of (the test plots), there's a good possibility that other crops are being contaminated," Freese said.
The U.S. is the largest producer of biotech crops in the world, with 135 million acres planted last year, according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications.
It was a little-known fact that the Germany-based Bayer AG (BAY) was experimenting in U.S. fields to produce a line of biotech rice and even received some government approvals, though the company said it never commercialized the product. Bayer found plenty of notoriety last year, though, when an unapproved type of its transgenic Liberty Link long grain rice was discovered in commerce.
European Union countries, which were big long-grain buyers, stopped importing when they realized the U.S. couldn't keep biotech rice out of its exports.
Now Mexico, which imported a record $204.5 million worth of U.S. rice last year, is demanding non-transgenic certification - something USDA officials are hesitant to commit to because of the difficulty in setting tolerance levels and testing protocols.
Mexico's temporary halt last week on U.S. rice shipments came on the heels of a USDA announcement banning of any of BASF Corporation's (BF) Clearfield 131 long grain seeds produced for 2005, 2006 or 2007. The seeds, which were supposed to be non-biotech, were contaminated with unapproved genetically modified traits. Field trials of Bayer's Liberty Link are again believed to be the source of contamination, said Ron DeHaven, administrator of USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
Ray Gilmer, a BASF spokesman, said the company is committed to working to find out what went wrong - how "a gene that shouldn't be there" got into the company's rice seeds. BASF, he said, wants to see the results of a government investigation into the episode.
USDA's DeHaven told Dow Jones Newswires that the agency is investigating how that could have happened, but noted there are a couple likely possibilities.
Pollen drift, he said, from an experimental crop that could have contaminated a nearby commercial field is one possibility. Another possibility is farm equipment contaminated on one site and used again at another, spreading the genetically modified grain.
Regardless of how the contamination occurred, it's proof stronger regulations and better government oversight is needed, said Greg Jaffee, Biotechnology Project Director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
"They need to find better ways to separate untested crops from the seed supply," Jaffee said.
But the USDA has known for years that experimental plant material has spread beyond test plots. In a 2004 public call for comment on USDA's plan to overhaul its regulation of transgenic plants, the agency said it has no authority over "adventitious presence" - the low-level presence of unapproved genetically modified organisms in "commercial crops, food, feed or seed."
The USDA, in the 2004 filing with the Federal Register, expressed uncertainty over whether it should implement some form of threshold level for unapproved biotech material, but just last week USDA Secretary Mike Johanns told reporters "trace amounts" should not be a concern.
Johanns, in response to Mexico's concern over the contamination of U.S. rice, said there are only "very, very trace amounts" on the U.S. market and "zero tolerance" is not an option.
"We believe there has to be some reasonable approach to trade," he said, including all sorts of other agricultural commodity contaminants, "because if you have zero tolerance ... you literally freeze up all international trade in agricultural products."
There is an ongoing debate in the U.S. on whether any "adventitious presence" tolerance levels will ever be set in the U.S., Director of the Pew Initiative on Biotechnology Michael Fernandez said, but added: "The trade implications of all of this ... are huge. There's no question about that."