More Procrastination

It may not be front page news in all the press, but the Arkansas Democrat Gazette--Northwest Arkansas Edition, is reporting that

Arkansans affiliated with the rice industry are looking for answers in the wake of the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s announcement Friday that trace amounts of unapproved genetically engineered rice had been discovered in U. S. long-grain rice samples.

In their article "Industry pursuing how rice strayed", by Nancy Cole in their Wednesday (23 Aug 2006) edition, they cover the facts, background and outstanding questions, foremost of which is: what happened?

• It remains unclear how this rice, which was grown in test fields from 1998 to 2001, got into the 2005 U. S. rice crop.
• Arkansas’ largest rice cooperative, Stuttgart-based Riceland Foods Inc., said late Monday that it had been investigating the matter since January, when an export customer discovered genetically engineered material in a shipment.
• The current contamination of U. S. rice supplies is “widespread” and likely to show up again in the 2006 crop

The highlight key figures on the importance of this crop to Arkansas, and the fact that such genetically engineered rice has never been desired by either major domestic customers (Anhaeser-Busch and Kellogg) nor export customers (Japan, Europe) which have now banned purchases of American long-grained rice until the situation is corrected. They did not note that the USDA had taken three weeks to make the announcement after receiving the confirmed test results from Bayer CropSciences.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported on August 16th that " Grass Created in Lab Is Found in the Wild". This was a bentgrass, also developed to be resistant to the herbicide Roundup, known generically as glyphosate.

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Other press includes

• New York Times : Unapproved Rice Strain Found in Wide Area
• Financial Times : EU Moves to Ban Modified Rice

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Tags: Bayer : Monsanto : rice : biotech : public safety : USDA : Roundup : glyphosate