EU urged to ban US rice in genes row

By Tobias Buck in Brussels
Financial Times
Aug. 22, 2006

The European Union was yesterday facing calls to ban all imports of rice from the US, after Washington conceded that traces of an unauthorised variety of genetically modified rice had entered the food and feed supply in the US.

The news has already sparked a backlash in Japan, which suspended US imports of long-grain rice on Saturday. In Brussels, the European Commission said yesterday it was treating the issue as "a matter of utmost urgency".

A Commission spokeswoman said officials were trying to get more information on the GM variety and its potential risks from US authorities and Bayer CropScience, the company that developed the GM rice.

Campaigners urged the Commission to follow Japan's example. "This is a complete scandal. The biotech industry has failed once again to control its experiments and lax regulations in the US have allowed consumers worldwide to be put at risk. The European Union must immediately suspend US rice imports until consumers can be guaranteed protection from untested and illegal foods," said Adrian Bebb, a GM campaigner with Friends of the Earth.

Bayer CropScience said on Friday the traces found in commercial rice samples in the US related to a "pre-commercial rice line, LLRICE601, it had developed that produces a protein conferring herbicide tolerance". The company said the protein was "well known to regulators and has been confirmed safe for food and feed use in a number of crops by regulators in many countries, including the EU, Japan, Mexico, US and Canada".

Mike Johanns, the US agriculture secretary, said last week that both the Department of Agriculture and the US Food and Drug Administration had reviewed "the available scientific data and concluded there are no human health, food safety, or environmental concerns associated with this [genetically engineered] rice".

European and US attitudes towards genetically modified plants and organisms have differed sharply in the past. While GM foods are consumed widely in the US, polls show that European consumers remain deeply distrustful of products containing GMOs.

In a ruling handed down in February, the World Trade Organisation found the EU's tight restrictions on GMO imports violated international trade rules.

The EU imported 224,000 tonnes of rice from the US last year, valued at Ł43m.