Grain Tainted U.S. Supply This Summer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 25, 2006; Page A03
The Department of Agriculture declared safe for human consumption yesterday an experimental variety of genetically engineered rice found to have contaminated the U.S. rice supply this summer.
The move by the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to deregulate the special long-grain rice, LL601, was seen as a legal boon to its creator, Bayer CropScience of Research Triangle Park, N.C. The company applied for approval shortly after the widespread contamination was disclosed in August and now faces a class-action lawsuit filed by hundreds of farmers in Arkansas and Missouri.
The experimental rice, designed to resist Bayer's Liberty weedkiller, escaped from Bayer's test plots after the company dropped the project in 2001. The resulting contamination, once it became public, prompted countries around the world to block rice imports from the United States, sending rice futures plummeting and farmers into fits.full article...
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