”The U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Food and Drug Administration have been notified by Bayer CropScience that the company has detected trace amounts of regulated genetically engineered rice in samples taken from commercial long grain rice.”

“Regulated” is a technical governmental term that means that a GM crop has not been approved to be eaten. Johanns added:

”In terms of the location of this sample and the information I’ve provided I can tell you very candidly, I didn’t ask where this sample came from. I know it’s long grain rice. I can’t tell you if that came from this state or that state.”

In actuality, it was a third party test which first detected the rice:

Riceland, a farmer-owned cooperative that markets rice produced by Southern farmers, issued a press release on August 18, saying it first discovered the contamination in January. Riceland conducted its own tests from several grain-storage locations and found: “A significant number tested positive for the Bayer trait. The positive results were geographically dispersed and random throughout the rice-growing area.”

Riceland notified Bayer of the contamination in May, but did not notify the public or the government.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) relies on corporate self-reporting on GM crops. Bayer did not tell the US government until 31 July. The USDA is not required to notify the public, so the department did not do so until a few weeks later, late in the day on a Friday. The next day, Japan suspended US long-grain rice imports. The following week, the European Union refused to allow imports unless they had been certified free of the contaminating rice. Subsequent news reports indicate that EU citizens, and likely the rest of us, have been unknowingly eating GM rice for months or even years. As The Independent of London said:

Britons have unwittingly been eating banned GM rice imported from the United States for months, if not years, food safety experts fear.

Imports of the rice were stopped by the European Commission (EC) on Thursday. But investigations in the US show that it has long been “wide-spread” in grain destined to be shipped overseas.

It was first discovered in January that the banned crop, which has never received safety clearance, was contaminating export stocks of long-grain rice. But it was not until nine days ago that the US government informed importing countries.

European governments are furious that the Bush administration delayed warning them. And the row threatens ministers’ plans for growing GM crops in Britain.

The unauthorised rice, codenamed LLRICE601, was developed by Bayer CropScience to tolerate weedkiller. It was tested on US farms between 1998 and 2001, but the company decided not to market it and never submitted it for official approval.

In January, it was found to have contaminated rice from Arkansas-based Riceland, the world’s largest miller and marketer, which is responsible for one-third of the entire US crop. […]

The Arkansas government suspects that the crisis began when pollen from the rice tested on US farms spread to contaminate conventional crops. This would mean that it has been present - and presumably been exported - at least since 2001, when the trials stopped.

Richard Bell, the state’s agriculture secretary, admits that the contamination is “widespread” and predicts it will show up again in this year’s crop when it is harvested.

Because Bayer withdrew its application to produce the rice commercially before safety tests were ever performed, the potential health risks to humans are unknown.

The price of US rice has dropped approximately 9% since news of the contamination broke. The US is the third-largest exporter of rice in the world, and long-grain rice accounts for approximately 80% of its rice exports.

On 28 and 29 August, attorneys representing various American rice farmers filed suit against Bayer CropScience, alleging that it failed to prevent its GM rice from contaminating the crop and seeking damages. More lawsuits are expected.

Meanwhile, on 22 August, Bayer filed for a permit to make the rice “nonregulated” (legal to consume), so that Bayer and the USDA can belatedly spin the contamination as an unfortunate but safe occurance (PDF of the application here).

It contains an artificial protein copied, through a GM [Genetic Modification] process, from a fish living in the frigid waters of the bottom of the North-west Atlantic.

An “anti-freeze” protein allows the fish - the ocean pout - to survive extreme cold. Unilever, the world’s biggest ice cream maker, says using its artificial equivalent allows it “to produce products with more intense flavour delivery, a wider range of novel textures and more intricate shapes”.

Unilever also says it can improve the “healthiness” of the ice cream by cutting its fat and sugar content - a claim that particularly angers its critics.

Many scientists are suspicious of these assertions. The article continues:

The scientists - Professor Malcolm Hooper, Emeritus Professor of Medical Chemistry at Sunderland University, Professor Joe Cummins, Emeritus Professor of Genetics at the University of Western Ontario, and geneticist Dr Mae-Wan Ho, director of the Institute of Science in Society - retort that it risks “letting off an immunological time bomb”. […]

The scientists insist that the protein is changed in the processing, and may pose a danger. Professor Hooper told The Independent on Sunday yesterday: “This is a novel protein manufactured by genetically modified organisms and its characteristics have never been fully evaluated. It needs to be checked out before it is widely introduced into the human diet.”

He and his colleagues also dispute the adequacy of Unilever’s safety checks, not least because it checked the protein against the blood of people allergic to cod, not the pout fish.

This kind of rigging is common amongst corporate and governmental tests of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). In an email in April to the genetically modified organism monitoring group GMWatch, the aforementioned Professor Joe Cummins said of Unilever:

In the FDA GRAS application the main focus of safety was the allergenicity of the ice structuring protein from the pouter fish. The main test was to examine effect of the ice structuring protein (ISP) on blood from 10 people with cod allergy. There was no indication that the blood contained IgE antibodies (allergic response) to the ISP. This experiment seems very strange to me because it tests blood that is allergic to cod but that allergen is a calcium binding protein called parvalbumin which is unrelated to ice structuring protein. Cod has an ice structuring protein but that protein is not at all related to the pouter ISP in the ice cream.

What I am saying is that Unilever’s main allergy test seems to be a dummy test that could never produce results relevant to the GM ice cream, it could only provide results showing no allergy, in other words it seems rigged to produce favorable results. Unilever provided a GRAS panel of experts who ignored the fecklessness of the allergy tests.

Shortly after the first article was published in The Independent on Unilever, Ben and Jerry’s repudiated the usage of the synthesized protein:

Ben & Jerry’s, the self-styled “all natural” ice cream manufacturer, has broken ranks with food giant Unilever amid controversy about GM ice cream. […] A spokesperson for Ben & Jerry’s said: “We would not dream of including anything like that in our products. One of the biggest problems is that we are affected by Unilever’s actions even though they are nothing to do with the way that we behave. The fact that we are not using this GM ingredient shows that we are not following all of their decisions.”

This controversy gets to the heart of an issue that is rarely explicitly discussed in many countries’ debates on allowing GMOs into the marketplace - children are often the primary targets of the foods. One of Unilever’s main brands in the US is Good Humor, one of the largest purveyers of ice cream treats for children. According to the shopper’s guide to modified products being sold in the US, many baby foods, cookies and other snack foods targeted at children, and children’s cereals all contain GMOs. Because many governments around the world have failed to inform consumers which products contain GMOs, much less protect consumers from potential dangers, it is up to consumers to educate themselves and their families. Children are considered by many to be most susceptible to developing allergies since their bodies are still growing, so the possibility that GM products can contain unknown proteins that one wouldn’t think of as being in said product – such as a corn protein in tomato puree – means that parents should be especially vigilant.