It never rains but it pours, and the scandal of US rice contaminated with an illegal genetically modified (GM) variety shows no signs of slowing down. In the latest twist, Friends of the Earth has indicated it intends to launch legal proceedings against the Food Standards Authority (FSA) after finding contaminated rice on sale in UK supermarkets.
Since the US government admitted in August that a strain of GM rice produced by multinational Bayer - known as LL601 - had entered the food chain, there have been fears that it could have reached Europe. Then last week, the European Commission confirmed that contaminated rice had been found in shipments from the US. In addition, we found products containing the contaminated rice on sale in German supermarkets.
Now, Friends of the Earth has tested rice samples from UK supermarkets, two of which from Morrisons' own brand range of rice - American long grain and American long grain brown - tested positive for GM material. Even though the test wasn't able to confirm the presence of LL601, Morrisons have withdrawn both products because no GM rice has been approved for sale in the EU and is therefore illegal.
Leaked memo
As reported in the Independent on Sunday, the threat of legal action was prompted by a leaked document indicating that the FSA has told food manufacturers that it does not expect them to test for contamination, or to remove any contaminated rice from their shelves. The FSA also claims the rice poses no risk to human health, despite the fact that no country in the world has cleared it for human consumption, due to the lack of appropriate testing.
Graham Thompson, GM campaigner for Greenpeace UK, is convinced that the FSA's priorities are questionable. "That the notoriously pro-GM FSA is peddling such irresponsible and probably illegal advice shows that covering for the biotech industry is a greater priority than protecting consumers," he said.
Will the government's new coexistence proposals, designed to make growing GM crops easier, prevent this sort of contamination in the future? Or is their strategy to allow widespread contamination until there is no GM-free environment to protect? Both the US and Chinese rice contamination scandals originated in experimental planting for study - in the case of the US this was from farm trials in 2001 and now five years later contamination is clearly widespread.
If scientists monitoring unapproved varieties are unable to prevent massive contamination problems, does the government really expect us to believe that Britain's farmers will do so much better?
