BELGIUM/FILE: European Union says shipment of suspected unauthorised GMO rice strain from the United States has arrived in the Netherlands

The EU said on Thursday (August 31) a shipment of a suspected unauthorised GMO rice strain from the United States arrived in the Netherlands on Saturday, after it imposed restrictions on U.S. long grain rice imports. "The Commission has received information from the industry that there may be a suspected positive shipment in Rotterdam. This is a shipment which arrived last Saturday so after the adoption of the commission emergency measures. It contains 20,000 tons of long grain rice. And although the shipment was unloaded it remains under customs control of the Dutch Authorities" EU Commission spokesman Philip Tod said. He added the industry had informed the EU of another suspected positive case in New Orleans which had not left the United States. According to Tod, the shipment in New Orleans was destined for Britain and Germany. More worrying for Brussels, the presence of the unauthorised rice strain in the U.S. commercial rice market may have been known for some time, maybe since early 2006. Last year, the 25 member states of the EU imported 300,000 tonnes of U.S. rice, with 85 percent being long grain. Tod said he could not rule out the possibility that contaminated rice had been imported into the EU. "The contamination may date back some time. It could date back to January this year if not earlier according to the information that we have from the industry. So we cannot, we've also informed member states that we cannot exclude that contamination of products have taken place. So we have asked member states to carry out intensive tests on products on the market," Tod said. Last week, the EU tightened requirements on U.S. long grain rice imports to prove the absence of a genetically modified (GMO) strain known as LL Rice 601 marketed by Germany's Bayer AG and produced in the United States. The EU decision followed the discovery by U.S. authorities of trace amounts of LL Rice 601, engineered to resist a herbicide, in long grain samples that were targeted for commercial use -- the first time this had happened. The EU's executive arm has already complained to Washington about its information policy that caused a near three-week delay in telling Brussels that traces of the unauthorised GMO were found in the commercial rice. Environmentalist organisation Greenpeace called on the EU to take stronger action against US food imports. They argue that the United States does not segregate its crops and therefore all foods could be contaminated. "The problem in both Japan and the EU is they don't want to offend the United States as a major trading nation. On the other hand they know that the United States is going to continue to contaminate the food supply because they don't segregate the genetically engineered and conventional and organic crops so it all gets mixed up. The United States doesn't have a proper testing system for determining whether conventional organic crops are contaminated with GE. We are going to see this happen over and over again until the countries of the world stand up and say "we know its likely to be contaminated. We need to stop it, prevent it, not continue to react to it on an ad hoc basis," Greenpeace spokesman Jeremy Tager said. Tager says unless the EU can guarantee that GMOs are not entering the European food chain, consumers are likely to stop buying, a huge problem considering rice is a staple food for millions of people he said. "There are millions of people in Europe who eat rice on a regular basis so quite clearly if people are not confident that their rice is not genetically engineered you would assume that people would begin to turn to other staple foods. That is a really serious problem when staple foods are beginning to be contaminated by the genetically engineering industry," Tager said. The disclosure of the contamination of experimental biotech rice owned by Bayer CropScience, a unit of Bayer AG , coupled with statements by USDA officials that they have no idea how the contamination occurred or how extensive it may be, has outraged players up and down the food chain. Farmers, food and beverage makers and exporters all are positioning themselves for a long, and likely costly, ordeal. Already, Japan has suspended imports of U.S. long grain rice because of the contamination, and Europe, a major export market for U.S. rice, has insisted rice imports be tested and any contaminated rice excluded from shipments to the 25-member European Union. Other U.S. rice customers are also reportedly reviewing their planned purchases even as U.S. rice prices have dropped sharply. Over the last decade, the USDA has approved applications for more than 49,000 field site tests of GMO crops and APHIS has deregulated more than 70 GMO crop lines, many of which have been embraced by farmers because they are easier and/or more profitable to grow. USDA and APHIS have touted the government's ability to oversee the growth of biotechnology in agriculture and repeatedly assured consumer groups and foreign governments that safety was a foremost concern for regulators. But an Office of Inspector General audit of APHIS' and its biotechnology regulatory services unit found numerous holes in oversight efforts and issued a stern warning in its December 2005 report.

ITN Source | September 1, 2006

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