Rice "Mystery" Illustrates Potential for Food Contamination with Unapproved, Genetically Altered Crops
Contamination underscores need for ban on drug-producing crops
We may never know how rice grown in the United States became contaminated with an unapproved genetically engineered (GE) variety. The widespread contamination was discovered in 2006, leading export markets to reject U.S. rice and causing millions of dollars in damage to the rice industry. Yet after a yearlong investigation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) conceded in October 2007 that it has no idea how the experimental rice made its way into the food supply.
This "mystery" contamination has important food safety implications for food crops engineered to produce pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals (pharma/industrial crops), which, like the GE rice, are regulated by the USDA. Under the department's notoriously lax regulatory system, drugs and industrial chemicals from pharma/industrial food crops are likely to end up in the U.S. food supply just as the unapproved rice did.
The USDA began investigating the rice contamination incident after then-USDA Secretary Michael Johanns announced in August 2006 that U.S. supplies of long grain rice had been contaminated with Bayer CropScience's LL601, a bioengineered rice variety that had been field tested years earlier but never approved for commercial production. Fourteen months later, after an investigation that consumed 8,500 staff hours, the department blamed missing records for its failure to find answers, and, as a result, announced it would take no enforcement action against Bayer CropScience.
In the interim, the USDA had deregulated LL601, legalizing the illegal contamination over the objections of 10,000 citizens who expressed concern in public comments. Meanwhile, the contamination has taken a tremendous economic toll on an important domestic agricultural sector. Recalls, future export losses from GE-wary European and Asian trading partners, and new testing procedures to detect the continued presence of LL601 in rice exports may ultimately cost U.S. rice growers, processors and exporters more than $1 billion.
This case illustrates a larger problem: because of the USDA's weak regulation of field tests of GE crops, contamination of food with unapproved varieties may be occurring on a large scale without anyone knowing about it. Over the years, thousands of tests of experimental GE varieties—including pharma/industrial corn, soybeans, rice, and safflower—have been conducted all over the country. The USDA does not have a program in place to monitor food stocks for the presence of such unapproved varieties.
"If this rice contamination occurred and went undetected for years after field testing of LL601, what else might now be lurking in our food?" asked UCS Senior Scientist Jane Rissler. "The next contamination event could involve a potentially dangerous drug or chemical."
Pharma/industrial food crops pose a particular problem because they are not intended to be eaten by the general population, and they could cause health problems if they are accidentally consumed. Because it is virtually impossible to keep these crops out of the food supply, the USDA should ban the use of food crops grown outdoors for this purpose.
A 2005 report by the USDA's inspector general (pdf) found that weaknesses in USDA regulations, including those for pharma crops, increase the risk that unapproved GE varieties will escape into the environment and the food supply.
