Genetically Engineered Rice Imports Banned

[Menydh]

Banned: GE Rice Imports

Greenpeace News
September 29, 2006

Just weeks after we uncovered US rice on supermarket shelves in Europe contained illegal genetically engineered (GE) rice, the scandal keeps growing with more illegal GE rice being discovered. In the latest blow for the GE industry, the world's largest rice processing company has stopped importing US rice into Europe due to the threat of contamination.

Ebro Puleva, which controls 30 percent of the European rice market, has stopped importing US rice due to the presence of an illegal GE rice strain. The rice strain causing the contamination is called LL601 and has not been approved for human consumption anywhere in the world. The company responsible for the contamination is Germany's Bayer who ended field trials of LL601 in the US five years ago. However, the LL601 rice escaped the field trials and has now contaminated an unknown number of conventional rice fields across the US.

Greenpeace investigations recently found another illegal GE rice contamination outbreak. This time it is from China and is a variety of rice called Bt63. Like the US however, Bt63 rice also escaped field trials and has now been found in processed rice imports into Europe. The extent of both GE contaminations is still unknown with new discoveries of contaminated rice occurring almost daily across Europe.

The move by Ebro Puleva to stop importing US rice follows a summer of scandals, with illegal GE contamination found in rice products all over Europe as well as in Japan. As a result of Bayer's recklessness, the global food industry is facing massive costs associated with this contamination, including testing costs, product recalls, brand damage, import bans and cancelled imports and contracts.

At least three multi-million dollar class action lawsuits have been filed by US rice farmers against Bayer CropScience already, as farmers struggle to protect their livelihoods from GE contamination. To compound Bayer's legal problems, they may soon be in the legal sights of Ebro Puleva too. The world's largest rice company has indicated that they expect to bring legal actions against Bayer as well.

"By imposing a blanket ban on rice imports from the US, Ebro Puleva has acknowledged how real and costly the risk of GE contamination is," said Jeremy Tager, GE campaigner from Greenpeace International. "With GE now as uneconomic as it is unacceptable, governments in countries that grow or import GE must stop placing farmers, consumers, the environment and industry at such high risk."

The illegal GE rice scandal continues to rage just as the WTO has finally published a ruling on a case brought against the EU by the US, Canada and Argentina over Europe imposing restrictions on the importing of GE food. At its heart, the dispute is about whether trade laws trump environmental laws - and surprise, surprise, to the WTO it is trade law rules.

"The WTO is clearly unqualified to deal with complex scientific and environmental issues, and yet, when there is a conflict between trade and environmental considerations, it is the WTO that gets to decide which rules rule; it's like putting the fox in charge of the chickens," said Daniel Mittler, Trade Policy Advisor at Greenpeace International

The latest GE contamination scandal shows that once GE organisms are released into the environment, the consequences for consumers, farmers and traders are enormous. The WTO has no place determining what people should eat and illegal GE rice has no place on the dinner tables of consumers anywhere in the world.


[source]

[Susi]

I think I read about this recently. It may have been in the Economist, I'm not sure, though.

This really to me means scientists should stop experimenting within the genomes of various species, given that they will not be entirely sure of what is the end result.

For example, take a mouse. What could they do to the mouse? They could probably change its physical traits, its mental traits, its suseptibility to disease; why, they could change practically everything they wanted.

To me, this is going too far. If we just leave things be, then they will work themselves out. I can understand hyrbidization (i.e. breeding two similar species together, such as one type of wheat with another) but not manipulating the basics...

[Menydh]

Hybridization in plants, vegetables and fruits comes often natural, without human intervention.

I remember having read years ago that all cereals had been manipulated to points where the human system could not digest them properly, since it would take a few thousand years for the human system to adapt to the genetic mutations.

The report is some years old and it also said that rice was the only cereal which kept free of genetic mutations which affected humans.

No more?

[Susi]

Apparently not.

What I meant to say is that natural hybridization is fine (or if you are trying to get, for example, a pink flower instead of a red or white one) in my opinion.

I could believe rice was mostly free of these genetic modifications some time ago, but not now. There is too many of these inferior GE plants going around...

[PointRadix]

Genetically modified corn - environmental benefits and risks

Date: 25/02/2008

Corn was domesticated 10,000 years ago when humans learned to cross-pollinate plants and slowly turned a scraggly nondescript grass called teosinte into plump, productive modern corn. As needs change, so does plant breeding. Today, while biotech super-giants manipulate corn genetics to satisfy farmer desires and a global market, indigenous farmers do so to fulfill individual needs. Although the tools differ, the goal remains the same-to cultivate desirable traits. Over time, selective breeding modifies teosinte's few fruitcases into modern corn's rows of exposed kernels.


Plant breeding was once restricted to sexually compatible plants, and generations of offspring were selectively bred to create unique varieties. In fact, corn, along with rice and wheat-today's global crop staples would not exist without such techniques. With the goal of ever-widening the pool of genetic diversity, conventional plant breeding has gotten more technologically savvy in recent years. For example, realizing that natural mutants often introduce valuable traits, scientists turned to chemicals and irradiation to speed the creation of mutants. From test-tube plants derived from sexually incompatible crosses to the use of molecular genetic markers to identify interesting hereditary traits, the divide between engineering and genetics was narrowing long before kingdom boundaries were crossed.


But when geneticists began to explore micro-organisms for traits of interest, such as Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) genes that produce a protein lethal to some crop pests, they triggered an uproar over ethical, scientific, and environmental concerns that continues today. Despite such discord, genetically modified (GM) crops have the fastest adoption rate of any new technology in global agriculture simply because farmers benefit directly from higher yields and lowered production costs. To date, the two most prevalent GM crops traits are Bt-derived insect resistance and herbicide resistance.

Since 1987, over 9,000 United States Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) permits have been issued to field-test GM crops. According to APHIS, corn is the most tested plant. The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications confirms that biotech corn is the second-most common GM crop (after soybean), with 12.4 million hectares planted in 2002. GM corn starch and soybean lecithin are just two of the ingredients already found in 70% of the processed food supply.


With future incarnations on the horizon, GM corn remains a lightening rod for debate. Embroiled in numerous controversies, corn has become biotech's boon and bane.

Source: eFood - European Laboratory Scientists Magazine