Liberty-Link Rice Uproar II
As reported in September’s issue of Chemically Speaking, Bayer’s event 601 was observed in the long-grain domestic rice crop this season. Toward the end of November, several new actions were announced regarding this occurrence. First, Bayer CropScience was cited as saying in response to a class-action lawsuit filed by hundreds of farmers in Arkansas and Missouri that rice farmers and an “act of God” are to blame for the inadvertent release of the unapproved crop. The 30-page response offers the first clue to how the company plans to defend itself against the 15 class-action lawsuits filed by farmers, who allege that they stand to lose millions of dollars because of the contamination. Denying any culpability, Bayer's response variously blames the escape of its gene-altered variety of long-grain race, LL601, on “unavoidable 
circumstances which could not have been prevented by anyone”; “an act of God”; and farmers' “own negligence, carelessness, and/or comparative fault.” Asked how farmers were at fault, Bayer spokesman Greg Coffey said the company does not comment on pending litigation.
Nearly a week later, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service declared the LL601 variety safe for human consumption. The company applied for approval shortly after the widespread contamination was disclosed in August. The 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. By September, rice prices had slumped about 10 percent and experts predicted that market losses would reach $150 million. Greg Coffey was quoted as saying, “The protein in the company's herbicide-tolerant rice varieties is well known to regulators, who have affirmed the rice poses no human health or environmental concern” adding that the company has no plans to sell the newly approved variety.
Even though most critics of the approval agree the rice is safe for consumption, they believe that the USDA is sanctioning an “approval-by-contamination” policy that can only increase the likelihood of untested genetically engineered crops entering the food supply in the future. The bacterial gene that is in LL601 is also in several approved varieties of engineered corn, canola and cotton. (Washington Post, 11/22/06 & 11/25/06).
