COM 0882.009 2006-2008 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

Ten seed dealers from Arkansas, Missouri and Louisiana recently sued Bayer, saying the company's carelessness ruined their seed. Rival BASF, which lost an estimated $15 million because it owns the banned Clearfield 131 variety, hasn't said whether it will sue, but its executives are unhappy. "We can't have an unwanted GM event floating around the seed supply," said one. Many other lawsuits have been filed. Tilda, a British importer of rice, has sued Bayer Crop Science, Riceland Foods and Producer's Rice Mill, saying it had to destroy or send back Arkansas rice. A Chicago tort lawyer named Adam Levitt has been named a lead counsel in a federal lawsuit brought on behalf of more than 400 rice growers. Not by coincidence, Levitt represented corn farmers who successfully sued Aventis Crop Science, Bayer's predecessor, over StarLink. Says Levitt: "Bayer knew Liberty Link rice could easily contaminate the rice supply, because Bayer contaminated the U.S. corn supply only a few years ago." Bayer says the company complied fully with the law. In a legal filing, its lawyers speculated that the alleged damages were caused by an "act of God." What Went Wrong? So its God's fault? That's about as good an answer as we've got right now to the question of what went wrong. The USDA's Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has been investigating since last summer, but the agency won't say what it has learned. In a sense, APHIS is investigating itself. Its track record, frankly, is a little scary. In 2005 the USDA's inspector general said that APHIS, which regulates field tests of biotech foods, didn't know the location of some field trials, did no independent testing of nearby crops and did not evert require submission of written protocols by some biotech firms, leaving the industry to, in effect, monitor itself. The audit concluded: "APHIS' current regulations, policies and procedures do not go far enough to ensure the safe introduction of agricultural biotechnology." APHIS says it has fixed the problems. "We regulate technology thaYs constantly changing, and our policies continue to evolve," John Turner, an agency official, told Fortune. As it turns out, its unlikely that Jacko Garretfs Texas rice escaped from the landfill to live another day. He grew a different variety of Liberty Link from the one that got into the Cheniere seed. Instead, the source of the contamination is probably a rice research station in Crowley, La., operated by Louisiana State University. The LSU fields appear to be among the very few places - if not the only one - where the Liberty Link rice was grown in proximity to fields where Cheniere and CL131 seeds were also being developed. The LSU rice-breeding station is run by a man named Steve Linscombe, one of the most admired men in the U.S. rice industry. Linscombe, who is 52, has devoted his entire career to developing nee-seed varieties that improve yields and resist pests or herbicides. "He has put