An Urban's Rural View

In some ways the case of the transgenic wheat that popped up uninvited in an Oregon field is playing out according to script. As in the Starlink corn and Liberty Link rice incidents, lawyers and foreign trade partners rushed to file lawsuits and boycott American wheat.

In other ways, the affair is unfolding unexpectedly. Monsanto's stock price has fallen less than 10% since the USDA announcement May 25 and is still trading almost $20 a share higher than a year ago. Wheat futures prices have held up better than expected, too.

Perhaps that's because of the most curious difference between this and earlier cases. Japan reportedly found Starlink contamination in 70% of its tests and Liberty Link contamination infested 30% of America's rice fields.

Monsanto's glyphosate-resistant wheat, by contrast, has shown up in 1% of one field of one small farm in one state, and done so eight years after the company ended field tests and pulled the plug on the project.

How could this have happened? Scientists remain befuddled. Eight years? Hard to believe it didn't surface earlier if it's really out there in significant quantities. Odd, too, that it surfaced now, even as the company is field-testing a different form of transgenic wheat.

Monsanto says it doesn't rule out sabotage. Fair enough, but proving sabotage, as opposed to ruling it out, will require evidence. As curious as the case is, other explanations leap to mind. Conspiracy is a possibility, but so are carelessness and corner-cutting. Which is most likely? Until investigators turn up evidence it's a matter of speculation.

Unlike in the Starlink case, where a trait that was only approved for animal feed had materialized in taco shells, the glyphosate-resistant wheat had been declared safe for human consumption. But like the earlier cases this one leaves makers and users and other proponents of transgenic seeds doing damage control. Monsanto says it has tested 30,000 wheat samples from 50 different varieties in Washington state and Oregon without finding any other traces of the trait.

USDA wants wheat to be independently tested. Monsanto warns it has the only test that doesn't produce large numbers of false positives. Both sides have a point. An independent, accurate test would indeed have more credibility, but an inaccurate test that exaggerates the harm is in no one's interest.

Unwanted appearances of gene-altered plants happen. They don't happen often, but every time they do reminds us we will probably never be entirely free of them. That has implications for future transgenic approvals.

It also suggests that to minimize the damage in future cases we need the best possible tests to be widely available. Industry and government need to get their technical types together to make that happen.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urban.lehner@telventdtn.com

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