by Rick Weiss
WASHINGTON POST

When Fred Zaun­brecher heard in August that the pop­u­lar vari­ety of long-grain rice he was plan­ning to grow had become con­t­a­m­i­nated with snip­pets of exper­i­men­tal, unap­proved DNA, the Louisiana rice farmer took it in stride and ordered a dif­fer­ent vari­ety of seed for his spring planting.

But when fed­eral offi­cials announced last week that the rice he and many oth­ers switched to was also con­t­a­m­i­nated — this time with a dif­fer­ent unap­proved gene — irri­ta­tion grew to alarm. The two side­lined vari­eties accounted for about a third of last year’s South­ern rice crop, and plant­ing was set to begin within days.

“Everybody’s been scram­bling for seed,” Zaun­brecher said. “I have no idea whether there will be enough or not.”

The tremors going through the U.S. long-grain rice indus­try — ampli­fied by the deci­sion of many biotech-wary nations to restrict imports of U.S. rice until ques­tions of purity are resolved — have revealed how vul­ner­a­ble a $1 bil­lion agri­cul­tural sec­tor can be to the escape of some­thing as small as a mol­e­cule of DNA. But rice is not the only crop being affected by genetic pollution.

Eleven years after the first gene-altered crops got the go-ahead for U.S. plant­ing, biotech acreage is at a record high. Almost 90 per­cent of U.S. soy and corn, as well as about 60 per­cent of U.S. cot­ton, is spiked with genes from other organ­isms, mostly to con­fer resis­tance to insects and to make the crops immune to weed-killing chemicals.

Yet some of those genes have spread to weeds, mak­ing them tougher to con­trol. Biotech crops approved only as ani­mal feed have found their way into human food. And plants engi­neered to make med­i­cines in their tis­sues have escaped from their test plots.

“Something’s not work­ing,” said Al Montna, who grows 2,500 acres of rice in Cal­i­for­nia. “Something’s got to change.”

Some farm­ers are point­ing fin­gers at biotech-seed pro­duc­ers, whose care­less­ness, they say, has allowed exper­i­men­tal DNA to drift into com­mer­cial vari­eties, trans­form­ing U.S. rice into a global pariah and send­ing the indus­try into its biggest cri­sis in memory.

Oth­ers are fed up with the Agri­cul­ture Depart­ment, which in the past six months has been scolded in three fed­eral courts for not keep­ing ade­quate tabs on the bur­geon­ing busi­ness of genet­i­cally engi­neered crops.

What­ever the root cause, the string of recent mis­steps has sul­lied an indus­try that, though long con­tro­ver­sial in much of the world, has mostly grown under the radar in the United States.

Advo­cates say the biotech rev­o­lu­tion has improved pro­duc­tiv­ity while reduc­ing the con­sump­tion of pes­ti­cides and trac­tor fuel. A report com­mis­sioned by indus­try leader Mon­santo Co., released last week, esti­mated that biotech crops in 2005 allowed farm­ers to reduce their car­bon diox­ide emis­sions by 9 mil­lion tons — equiv­a­lent to remov­ing 4 mil­lion cars from the roads.

But increas­ingly, farm­ers are con­clud­ing that early assur­ances that engi­neered vari­eties could be kept seg­re­gated from con­ven­tional crops were overstated.

So far, gene escapes have not had dis­cernible effects on human or ani­mal health, lead­ing some pro­po­nents to sug­gest that the real prob­lems are the strict rules in place from the early days of biotech, when safety was a major concern.

“Most of these issues have been issues of reg­u­la­tory com­pli­ance and qual­ity con­trol,” said L. Val Gid­dings, pres­i­dent of PrometheusAB, a Sil­ver Spring-based biotech con­sult­ing firm. “These are impor­tant, but they aren’t safety concerns.”

Gid­dings and some oth­ers say it is time for more dis­crim­i­nat­ing stan­dards that would treat many biotech crops as envi­ron­men­tally friendly instead of crim­i­nal­iz­ing every smidgen of errant DNA.

Oth­ers see things differently.

“For years the indus­try said, ‘This will never get out,’ ” said Joseph Mendel­son III, legal direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Food Safety, a Wash­ing­ton advo­cacy group that has won sev­eral legal chal­lenges against the Agri­cul­ture Department’s han­dling of biotech crops. “Now it’s, ‘It will get out, but what does it mat­ter?’ We can have a sci­en­tific debate about that, but in the mean­time it cer­tainly mat­ters a lot eco­nom­i­cally, because so much of the world doesn’t want this stuff.”

U.S. farm­ers such as Zaun­brecher have been caught in the mid­dle, fight­ing off domes­tic efforts to intro­duce gene-altered rice until inter­na­tional mar­kets warm to the prod­uct. He was going to plant a con­ven­tional vari­ety called Che­niere on at least 500 of his more than 2,000 acres, until he learned that it had become inex­plic­a­bly tainted with a weedkiller-resistant gene cre­ated by Bayer Crop­Science of Research Tri­an­gle Park, N.C., that was unap­proved for rice.

In its place, he ordered Clearfield131, another non-engineered vari­ety, devel­oped by BASF of Ger­many. But on March 5, the USDA put out an emer­gency call to pre­vent all plant­ing of that vari­ety. Tests had found two laboratory-made genes not meant to be in it, one belong­ing to Bayer and one that has yet to be fully identified.

“Everybody’s frus­trated,” said Bobby Hanks, who employs about 100 work­ers at Louisiana Rice Mill near Crow­ley. “At this point, the indus­try has very lit­tle con­fi­dence in researchers to keep these things out of the food stream.”

Cyn­thia Sagers, a plant ecol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­sity of Arkansas, said USDA rules on how to iso­late exper­i­men­tal rice from other vari­eties have not been strin­gent enough. Text­books say rice is a self-pollinating plant, mean­ing its pollen does not drift far. “But stand in an Arkansas rice field at 11:45 on a sunny day,” Sagers said, “and you’ll see a zil­lion bil­lion pollen grains blow­ing around.”

Even if the pollen is con­tained, acci­den­tal min­gling of engi­neered and con­ven­tional seeds occurs eas­ily, espe­cially when biotech vari­eties are not restricted to ded­i­cated equip­ment and dis­tri­b­u­tion streams.

A string of recent court rul­ings has revealed reg­u­la­tory short­com­ings for other biotech crops. In August, a fed­eral judge crit­i­cized the USDA, say­ing it had “utter dis­re­gard” for the risks posed by plant­i­ngs of biotech corn and sugar cane that the agency had endorsed in Hawaii. Two rul­ings in Feb­ru­ary took the agency to task for not fully con­sid­er­ing the risks posed by biotech alfalfa and turf grass.

In the absence of stricter fed­eral rules, some states have taken mat­ters into their own hands. When a com­pany recently sought per­mis­sion to grow rice endowed with human drug-producing genes in Cal­i­for­nia, offi­cials there said okay — if the com­pany stayed at least 500 miles from the near­est rice field and waited for a spe­cial rul­ing from the state’s Depart­ment of Food and Agriculture.

When the com­pany sought instead to plant in Mis­souri, that state’s leg­is­la­ture with­held promised research money until the com­pany gave up and moved to Kansas — a state that wel­comed the project in part because no other rice is grown there.

Cindy Smith, deputy admin­is­tra­tor in charge of biotech­nol­ogy reg­u­la­tion at the USDA’s Ani­mal and Plant Health Inspec­tion Ser­vice, said that over­sight has improved con­sid­er­ably in the past two years and that other changes are com­ing. Cen­tral among them is a risk-based sys­tem that will stream­line approvals of biotech crops that are sim­i­lar to oth­ers with proven safety records while rais­ing the bar for those that pose the great­est risks.

“The nature of our reg­u­la­tory sys­tem is that it has to con­tin­u­ally evolve . . . because we’re reg­u­lat­ing a tech­nol­ogy that con­tin­ues to evolve,” Smith said. And though she said she “fully appre­ci­ates” the grav­ity of the occa­sional fail­ing, Smith noted that the agency has over­seen more than 13,500 field tests on nearly 80,000 loca­tions nation­wide, the vast major­ity with­out a hitch. />
Yet in today’s global mar­ket — in which biotech food is largely shunned, in part as a mat­ter of “green” phi­los­o­phy and in part as a covert means of trade pro­tec­tion­ism — that may not be enough, said Montna, the Cal­i­for­nia grower, who is chair­man of the USA Rice Federation.

“Every­thing is about mar­ket accep­tance,” Montna said, not­ing that the rice fed­er­a­tion has pushed for stricter test­ing of all seed to pre­vent future surprises.

That would help not only farm­ers but seed com­pa­nies, too — some of which are now suf­fer­ing from decreased sales because their vari­eties have become con­t­a­m­i­nated, and oth­ers of which are being sued for mis­plac­ing their genes.

“I’m see­ing a lot of very, very angry peo­ple,” said Adam Levitt, a Chicago lawyer who is involved in a class-action law­suit against Bayer that already includes hun­dreds of rice farm­ers and millers.

Bayer spokesman Greg Cof­fey said the com­pany should not be blamed if the fed­eral rules that it fol­lowed are inadequate.

“We do believe our work has adhered to USDA reg­u­la­tory guide­lines,” he said, com­plet­ing the cir­cle of blame that on many farms today is as famil­iar as the seasons.