GE Rice Update:
Organic Rice Surges While
GE Rice Falters

By Alex Jack

Dangers of LibertyLink
GE Research Intensifies
Contamination Spreads
Limits on Biotechnology
Organic Rice Initiatives

Following the burial of the world's first harvest of genetically
engineered rice this spring in Texas, the introduction of new GE rice has been
derailed-for the moment. At the same time, a downturn in the U.S. rice industry has
made organic rice more attractive than ever.

Aventis Cropscience, the manufacturer, destroyed nearly 5 million
pounds of LibertyLink rice, the world's first GE rice grown for commercial
production, in May because it was worried that the herbicide-resistant rice was
not approved in Japan and other coun-tries. An even more compelling reason was
Aventis's fear that LibertyLink could be the target of lawsuits akin to those
levied against its StarLink corn that has contaminated the U.S. corn supply.

Following the GE rice disaster, the large Franco-German biotech company
decided to get out of the GE food business altogether and inked a deal
to sell its Cropscience division to Bayer, the German pharmaceutical giant.
Bayer will assume liabilities of $1.7 billion for the StarLink corn disaster. It
has not indicated whether it will reintroduce LibertyLink rice, but chances
are it will try again.

GE rice research continues uninterrupted in other parts of the U.S.,
and China announced the development of several new GE experimental rice
varieties this summer. The biotech industry con-tinues to push GE Golden Rice
as its poster crop, taking out full-page ads in TV Guide, the New York Times,
and other publications as part of a $250 million campaign to sell GE food to the
American public. A United Nations panel of experts issued a glowing report on
the benefits of biotechnology for the world's poor, even as indigenous farmers
around the world continued to rally against GE rice and other crops.

In Congress, the first vote on GE issues was taken this summer. The House
of Representatives defeated an amendment introduced by Congressman
Dennis J. Kucinich (D., Ohio and a contributor to Amberwaves) and Pete
DeFazio (D., Oregon) for a 1-year moratorium on GE salmon by a vote of
279 to 145. Though defeated by a 2-1 margin, GE opponents were elated that
such a large bloc coalesced so quickly against the powerful biotech lobby, including
87 members of Congress who had not previously co-sponsored Rep. Kucinich's
bill to require mandatory labeling of GE foods. The latest ABC-TV poll reported
that 93% of the American public want GE foods to be labeled, 57% would be
less likely to buy them, and nearly two-thirds of women feel they are unsafe.

Dangers of LibertyLink

Amberwaves hailed Aventis's decision to destroy the first harvest of
LibertyLink rice. In a press release, the grassroots organization called for a
moratorium on growing GE rice, wheat, and other grains and called upon America's
major food producers to pledge not to use GE staples in their products,
pending comprehensive studies of the impact of GE grains on human health and the
environment. The press release was widely distributed on the Internet, including web
sites that serve the rice and biotechnology industries.

In its statement, Amberwaves declared that GE rice threatens to contaminate
conventional and organic crops, release potentially harmful organisms
into the environment, imperil the livelihood of farmers and their families, and
endanger hundreds of species of birds, mammals, and other wildlife that live in
rice fields.

While approved for human consumption by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration (FDA), LibertyLink rice was treated with glufosinate (which carries
the trade name Liberty), an herbicide that has not been approved yet for rice
(though it has been approved for corn, cotton, and rapeseed). Aventis said
that it could have kept the rice in storage pending approval by the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA), but the prospect of foreign liability caused it to
withhold the rice. On May 21, a caravan of 95 tractor-trailer trucks, containing
2272 metric tons, started hauling the rice to a landfill in Alvin, outside of
Houston. Altogether about 40 million servings of modified rice were deep-sixed.

"While Aventis made the right decision not to release the crop, the LibertyLink
debacle in Texas raises serious environmental questions," Amberwaves noted.
"Like nuclear waste, contaminated crops must be disposed of properly."

Following the production of the first GE rice in America, Amberwaves
commissioned the first independent scientific study of LibertyLink rice. Dr. Joe
Cummins, a geneticist in Ontario, Canada who has written extensively on
biotechnology, reported that the GE rice was recklessly approved, even though
the U.S. government knew that it would contaminate surrounding plants and that
glufosinate causes birth defects in experimental animals, including brain defects
leading to behavioral changes, cleft lip and skeletal defects, miscarriage, and infertility.

(see the full report GE Liberty Link Rice: A Scientific Report by Geneticist Joe
Cummins).

In Brazil, LibertyLink rice has been banned because of its harmful effects on the
environment.

GE Research Intensifies

Across the nation and around the world, the research and development of GE rice
continues:

The University of Arkansas announced in June that it had received a patent on a
high-yielding long-grain rice variety known as Wells. University officials said that
they would license the novel hybrid strain to biotech companies that wanted to
produce new GE varieties. Arkansas produces more than 40% of the rice in the
U.S. on about 1.5 million acres.

The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture announced this spring that
it had approved three varieties of Monsanto's herbicide-tolerant rice.
The next step is a mandatory food safety assessment before it can be
commercially released.

The U.S. Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), a consumer's
advocacy organization, reported that rice was among the top crops in
the U.S. to be tested by biotech companies and universities. The five
principal foods field tested between 1987 and 2000 were corn, potato,
soybeans, tomato, and cotton, followed by melons and squash, tobacco,
rapeseed, wheat, beets, and rice.

China announced in July that it had developed a "super rice" that could
yield double the harvest of normal grain by 2008. The high yield
variety is made by inserting a corn gene into hybrid rice. In
southeastern Zhejiang Province, another group of Chinese scientists
announced that that were developing a GE rice resistant to the pyralid
moth, a major pest. On Hainan Island in southern China, a third research
team modified tomatoes, eggplants, and hot pepper to grow with seawater
and said that rice irrigated with salt water would be their next target.

Contamination Spreads

Over the summer, the contamination of conventional and organic crops
continued to spread. StarLink corn, the unapproved GE corn that inadvertently
got into the American food supply last year, has turned up in both yellow and
white corn varieties. Some organic certification agencies warned producers and
consumers that they could no longer certify organic, some food manufacturers
dropped corn or switched to other grains in their products, and Australia announced
that it would no longer import organic corn from the U.S.

In Canada, GE contamination of rapeseed has devastated the natural and
organic canola oil market, and soybean farmers throughout North
America report an increase in contamination as well. As noted last issue, an
independent laboratory investigation this spring, sponsored by the Wall Street
Journal, found that 80% of natural foods products containing corn or soy and
labeled "GE Free" were contaminated. In a lead front-page article, the New York
Times this summer reported that GE contamination was so widespread that it would
be virtually impossible to regulate biotech crops. "The hope of the industry is
that over time the market is so flooded [with GEOs] that there's nothing you
can do about it. You just sort of surrender," Don Westfall, a food industry
consultant, told the Toronto Star.

Limits on Biotechnology

On the positive side, the main United Nations food standards organization
agreed to draw up international guidelines to regulate the safety of GE foods
on supermarket shelves, including testing for allergic reactions. (The EPA's
science advisory panel this summer urged that the ban on StarLink corn in
human food be maintained, saying there was not enough evidence to establish
if it caused allergic reactions.) The UN also brokered a landmark agreement
to preserve the world's diversity of agricultural crops by requiring plant developers
to make mandatory payments in return for access to public seed banks. The
agreement emphasized the need for farmers to freely save, use, exchange, and
sell farm-saved seeds. A bitterly contested issue related to intellectual property
rights (and biopiracy) was put off until an FAO conference in November.

On this front, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected thirteen of
sixteen claims for a controversial patent on Basmati rice. RiceTec, a Texas
company, tried to patent the grain's genetic structure and secure a world
monopoly on sales, but was challenged by the government of India which
held that basmati rice has been grown in Asia for thousands of years.

As global opposition to GE food and the appropriation of native plants
mounted, the developers of GE Golden Rice have had trouble getting
funding. Earlier this year, critics discovered that Golden Rice would provide
only a fraction of the vitamin A it was designed to supply to deficient
children and that a mother or child would have to eat several kilos a day to
get the RDA. Co-inventor Peter Beyer came to the Biotechnology Industry
Organization Conference in San Diego in June to seek private investors and
approached the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As thousands of
demonstrators took to the streets to protest GE foods, Brian Tokar, a
professor of social policy and member of Biojustice, was widely quoted in
the press, "The purported benefits of Golden Rice are completely fabricated."

Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet, weighed in against
biotechnology with a stirring essay in the Los Angeles Times. "Hunger
is not caused by a scarcity of food but by a scarcity of democracy.
Thus it can never be solved by new technologies, even if they were to be
proved 'safe.' It can only be solved as citizens build democracies in which
government is accountable to them, not private corporate entities."

Organic Rice Initiatives

As the GE debate swirled, rice growers found themselves foundering.
"The U.S. rice industry is fighting for its life, with farmers, millers,
and the communities they live in, all on the front line," the U.S. Rice
Federation (USA Rice) stated in an early summer press release. Though
rice consumption has risen sharply in recent years following healthier national
guidelines, one of every five rice mills has either closed, gone into bankruptcy,
or is on the market.

Over the summer, rice has become a key foreign policy issue. 2.7
million metric tons, about half the U.S. crop, is exported each year, and
about 20% is shipped abroad as food aid. In the past, the U.S. State Department
has supported sending "value added" (milled or polished white rice), but there is
now a move afoot to allow unprocessed rice (known as "rough rice")
to be sent. USA Rice, which represents 80% of domestic rice growers
and nearly all millers, contends that sending rough rice overseas costs milling
jobs at home and subsidizes foreign rice processing facilities.

In Texas and Louisiana, milling has dropped to 20-30% of capacity, and
normally conservative politicians are urging the State Department to
relax its ban on trading with Cuba, America's largest rice partner before an
embargo on the Castro regime 40 years ago.

In California, meanwhile, the energy crisis has sent the cost of irrigating
rice soaring and caused farmers to seek new sources of revenue. In the
Sacramento Valley, plans are underway to build a large factory to process rice
straw, which is increasingly being used in the construction industry as a low-cost,
energy-efficient building material. In Fairfield, NRE World Bento is making boxed
lunches (bento) with frozen California organic rice and shipping 7000 meals to Japan
each day. The appearance of the O-bento (O is for organic) caused shock waves in
Tokyo, where the import of foreign rice is a touchy issue. Japan is threatening to
bring it up at the next WTO conference because bentos made with imported rice
cost half as much as those made with heavily subsidized Japanese rice!
Lundberg Farms, the principal grower of organic rice in California, supplies
the rice, and NRE Bento says the market is barely tapped. Japan Railway East,
the major stockholder in the company, sells up to 120,000 bento a day and
estimates the potential market in schools, hospitals, and other outlets is in the
millions.

In other natural product news, the U.S. Agricultural Research Service
is developing doughnuts and french fries made with rice flour that absorb
70% less oil than wheat flour or potatoes, and a Canadian company announced
an upscale line of new organic rice beverages sweetened with amasake.

Natural and organic developments like this may be the ultimate
solution to many political, economic, and social problems. They benefit human
health and the planet-and are also good for business.

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Alex Jack, president of Amberwaves, is a teacher, dietary counselor,
and author of more than 25 books on diet, health, and the environment

This article is excerpted from the autumn issue of Amberwaves Journal.
© 2001 by Amberwaves. Permission is granted to reprint it for
educational purposes, so long as it is properly credited: Reprinted from
Amberwaves, Box 487, Becket, MA 01223, www.amberwaves.org