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Traces of genetic engineering in organic rice - The story of a traceability investigation

Screening, lengthy laboratory tests by various national laboratories and tracing back to the suspected sources of the contamination obviously took a long time. It took more than a year from the time the Hessian food monitoring organisation took a sample from a shop in Marburg to the notification to the European Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF). In Germany, the Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety (BVL) publishes such reports via the Lebensmittelwarnung.de web portal. The basmati rice was imported by a Dutch company. The company informed the Pakistani exporter. The discovery made waves in Pakistan and raised further questions.

The Informationsdienst Gentechnik has investigated the cause of the delay and the “rare find” and also revealed the suspected source of the GM contamination. This could be basmati rice B-307, which was released once in Pakistan in 2001/2002 for research purposes.

You can read the detailed article in German with many links at Informationsdienst Gentechnik.