Gene-altered rice’s scope is aired
Posted on Friday, October 6, 2006
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/168812/
About 11 percent to 12 percent of Arkansas’ 2005 rice acreage was planted in the long-grain variety that has been found to contain trace amounts of an unapproved, genetically engineered rice, Arkansas Agriculture Secretary Richard Bell said Thursday.
That estimate from the state Plant Board is the first measure of the scope of the problem that has rocked the $ 800 million rice industry in Arkansas.
Bell assured the House and Senate Interim Committees on Agriculture, Forestry and Economic Development at the state Capitol that the Plant Board will develop a testing program to help guide farmers before they begin planting their 2007 crop in April.
Cash prices for rice in Arkansas fell from $ 3. 71 a bushel on Aug. 18, when the U. S. Department of Agriculture disclosed the problem, to a low of $ 3. 27, but they fully recovered by Sept. 22, Bell told the committee.
Farmers who sold their rice during the downturn felt the brunt of the market reaction.
“With high fuel costs, high fertilizer costs, drought and poor commodity prices... rice was the one commodity that had some hope this year of bringing us out of this two-year-long slump that we’ve been in. And then this happens,” John Alter, president of the Arkansas Rice Growers Association, told the committees.
More than a dozen federal class-action suits have been filed against Bayer CropScience, whose experimental transgenic rice, LLRICE 601, is at the heart of the problem. One suit has been filed in state court in Arkansas against Bayer and Stuttgart-based Riceland Foods Inc., which has acknowledged that it had been investigating the problem since January. Even though the USDA and the Food and Drug Administration have said that the incident poses no health, food-safety or environmental concerns, the European Union has suspended all U. S. long-grain rice imports pending testing that proves shipments are free of transgenic material. The 25-nation bloc, which traditionally buys about 4 percent of the U. S. long-grain rice crop, has resisted the sale of genetically engineered foods for years. In 2005, Arkansas produced 57. 4 percent of U. S. long-grain rice.
The European market is largely a higher-value parboiled rice market, which is important to such Arkansas rice millers as Riceland Foods, Producers Rice Mill Inc. and Riviana Foods Inc., Bell said.
“Finding an alternative market quickly will not be easy,” said Bell, who retired in 2004 as president and chief executive of Riceland.
Several rice shipments have been caught in transit to Europe, Bell said. Some have been “arrested” while others have been returned, he said.
“We have a number of barges which are stationed along the Mississippi River, ready to go down the river, but the uncertainty is causing them not to do that,” Bell said. “This is going to be a very costly episode for the trading part of our rice industry.”
Alter said farmers know research keeps them competitive in the world market. “However, research that is conducted in close proximity to a $ 900 million a year crop is a big gamble,” Alter said.
“It has to be controlled and policed very closely,” he said.
USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which is preparing a report on the current incident, was found deficient in December by the department’s own inspector general for the way it controls the testing of genetically engineered crops, Alter said.
He called upon legislators to give the state more responsibility in regulating such crops.
“We have to find the resources to empower the Plant Board to give the farmer the protection that he deserves,” Alter said.
Although the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service’s report is not expected until late December, Bell said he and Darryl Little, director of the Arkansas Plant Board, believe the problem is the result of mechanical commingling rather than cross-pollination.
“If that’s true, it becomes a much more manageable problem when we come to the 2007 crop,” Bell said.
Little said a mechanical-mixup hypothesis does a good job of explaining the incident, where genetic material from Bayer’s experimental rice LLRICE 601 was detected in one year, across a wide area and in low levels — as low as six kernels in 10, 000 kernels of rice, according to Riceland Foods.
“Most likely it was a mixture of seed at an early level in seed production,” Little said.
The only seed rice that has tested positive for traces of LLRICE 601 is 2003 Cheniere, a variety developed by Louisiana State University AgCenter’s Rice Research Station near Crowley.
“In just three years [a variety ] can go from a plant breeder to wide distribution throughout the rice industry, and... we think that’s probably what happened with this particular incident,” Little said.
Based upon information compiled from the Plant Board’s seed-certification program, about 700, 000 bushels of Cheniere seed were produced in Arkansas for the 2005 crop year, enough seed to plant about 300, 000 acres or about 15 percent of the Arkansas rice crop, Little said.
“There’s really not that much Cheniere grown in Arkansas. There’s actually only 11 or 12 percent, because a lot of our rice seed that we produce is exported,” he said.
The comparable estimates for the 2006 crop year are 600, 000 bushels of Cheniere, enough to plant about 250, 000 acres, Little said.
Bell told the committees that he and Little held an initial meeting Tuesday in Little Rock with representatives from Bayer, the German company whose transgenic rice is at the center of the controversy.
“I didn’t tell them what to do, but I did remind them of what had happened in the StarLink [corn ] case a couple of years ago, which was a similar problem,” he said.
In that case, Aventis, which now is owned by Bayer, covered the cost of returning corn shipments from Europe and Japan, Bell said. Although Bayer is cooperating with five U. S. laboratories to test for the presence of LLRICE 601, Bell said the labs and Bayer are using different standards.
“We have to come to some reconciliation on these testing procedures or we’re going to be hung up for months,” he said.
Bell said USDA was slow to respond to the marketing problems that have been created in Europe, but a USDA team is in Brussels now to discuss the issue with EU representatives.
“Two deputy undersecretaries of agriculture are there basically to talk about some type of tolerance,” which would be permissible in the testing that the Europeans are requiring, he said.