GM WATCH comment: The USDA has approved Ventria Bioscience's plans to plant 3,000 acres of GM pharma rice on plots in Kansas. The rice has been genetically engineered with human genes so that it expresses human proteins.

Already GM rice trials elsewhere in the US have caused widespread contamination of the US rice supply. Now the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has obtained evidence of lax oversight of similar plantings by Ventria in North Carolina.

EXTRACTS: The USDA has long maintained that it has a strong oversight program to protect the food supply, and that it carefully monitors companies' compliance with pharma crop regulations. In an April 2006 conversation with UCS staff, Ventria CEO Scott Deeter also stated that the company has complied fully with USDA regulations. The documents obtained by UCS de-bunk these claims..

...the records paint a grim picture of agency negligence and disregard for the environment and food safety

USDA records show that the agency completed only three of five required inspections of Ventria's pharma rice in 2005...

The USDA failed to inspect the Ventria site during planting and harvest... the so-called "harvest" inspection was dated a full two months after the actual harvest...

The USDA also apparently failed to enforce Ventria's supplemental permit conditions

...Hurricane Ophelia passed close by the site in September 2005... hurricane-force winds might blow pharma rice seeds off the site, or... heavy rains and flooding might wash plants and seeds away. Even with the rice nursery less than a mile away, it seems that the USDA took no action to determine the effects of the hurricane, and there was no inspection of the site until mid-December.

NOTE: The following page also has links to some very useful related resources - see end
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UCS Uncovers Lax USDA Oversight of Pharma Crops
New Evidence Points to Need for Ban on Pharma Food Crops
http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_environment/genetic_engineering/usda-ventria-oversight.html

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and other groups have been concerned for some time about the food safety, public health, and environmental risks posed by genetically engineered pharmaceutical-producing crops (pharma crops). In particular, we have been skeptical of the ability of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to rigorously protect the food supply from contamination by these crops.

Last December, the agency's internal auditor publicly criticized the USDA's oversight program. Now, UCS has obtained agency documents confirming that the USDA is still not properly enforcing its pharma crop regulations.

In particular, these records document the USDA's apparent failure to adequately monitor and inspect pharmaceutical rice fields in North Carolina - even after a hurricane blew through the area, potentially contaminating a nearby rice breeding facility.

In a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted in January 2006, UCS asked for information on agency inspections and company compliance with federal requirements on approximately 60 acres of pharma rice grown by Ventria Bioscience in North Carolina in 2005. This rice was the most controversial and most closely watched pharma crop production that year. Ventria had previously been chased from California-where rice growers, the public, and state regulators objected to its plan to produce rice genetically modified to produce therapeutic human proteins—to Missouri-where approval was delayed after food industry giant Anheuser-Busch threatened to boycott the state's rice if Ventria's pharma rice were grown there.

Ventria finally settled on a site in North Carolina, a state where no commercial rice is grown. However, this site also proved controversial, because it was just 0.6 miles from a joint USDA/state operated research station where rice varieties from around the world are tested before introduction into U.S. rice breeding programs. The USDA allowed the company to grow its pharma rice at this location over the objections of research station personnel, who worried that contamination of rice there could easily lead to widespread contamination of food products nationwide.

In April 2006, the USDA responded to UCS's FOIA request, releasing enforcement and compliance records for Ventria's North Carolina site for the 2005 growing season. These documents offer a window through which watchdog groups and the public can view details of the USDA's oversight and the company's compliance with federal requirements. They show how often the USDA inspected, what it found, and how well Ventria followed the rules for producing pharma crops outdoors. In this case, the records paint a grim picture of agency negligence and disregard for the environment and food safety. Among the sobering revelations:

Astonishingly, the records contain no evidence of communication between the USDA and the company after Hurricane Ophelia passed close by the site in September 2005. It is not a stretch to imagine that hurricane-force winds might blow pharma rice seeds off the site, or that heavy rains and flooding might wash plants and seeds away. Even with the rice nursery less than a mile away, it seems that the USDA took no action to determine the effects of the hurricane, and there was no inspection of the site until mid-December.

USDA records show that the agency completed only three of five required inspections of Ventria's pharma rice in 2005. According to the USDA policy, each pharma crop production site is to be inspected a total of seven times to ensure that growers carefully follow the rules at each stage of production. Five inspections are to occur at critical points during the initial growing season and two the subsequent year. In the documents UCS obtained, however, we could find a record of only three inspections at each of the three rice fields at Ventria's site.

The USDA failed to inspect the Ventria site during planting and harvest. These are two of the critical times when the agency is supposed to inspect in order to ensure that machinery is properly used to prevent the movement of pharma crops off the site. In the Ventria case, the so-called "harvest" inspection was dated a full two months after the actual harvest, so the USDA apparently never saw the harvesting equipment in use.

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