An unidentified researcher holds natural rice (left) and GM rice (right) developed by Huazhong Agriculture University in Wuhan, Hubei Province. Photo: IC

By Sun Zhe

Huang Renjia said he wouldn't have bought any rice from a Wal-Mart near his community in Changsha, Hunan Province, if he had known it was genetically modified (GM).

"I don't dare put something totally strange in my mouth," said Huang, a 31-year-old Changsha resident and a clerk with a local real estate developer.

"I know nothing about GM rice. I have rice three times a day, so Wal-Mart should have labeled it if they wanted to sell it."

No one would have likely labeled it because it is illegal to sell GM rice in China. It has yet to be approved for mass production.

Repeated mistakes

The GM rice was found in Wal- Mart and three other supermarkets, following random tests of about 40 rice samples from supermarkets in the southern and central provinces in February, according to a report by Green Peace, the international environmental NGO.

In a second test in May of 16 rice samples from the same area, only the sample from Wal-Mart was detected as GM-positive, according to Wang Weikang, a campaigner with the Green Peace China office.

A Hong Kong-based laboratory, which prefers not to be named, conducted all the tests.

Wal-Mart had promised before 2005 that it will only offer non-GM food in Europe and conduct strict tests on agricultural products, though the same was apparently not done in China.

"They know how to keep GM food outside. It's just they have no respect for Chinese consumers. They just do not want to do it here in China, though they know Chinese want non-GM food too," said Wang.

Two separate surveys done by Ipsos, an independent market research firm, in 2007 and by Beijing-based Tsinghua University this year found that about 65 percent of the consumers only want to consume non-GM food.

Green Peace is suing Wal-Mart for selling GM rice in China. Repeated calls by the Global Times to Wal-Mart China's corporate office for comment were not answered.

Tracking the seeds

Under different names, wrapped with various packages, the GM rice products and seeds found so far were from five Southern provinces, Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, Guangdong and Fujian, and they were of the same type - Bt63.

Bt63 fall into the category of "Bt rice." A gene segment of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), a bacterium species, is inserted into the rice gene so that rice can generate a certain protein to kill pests.

Bt63 was developed by a team led by Zhang Qifa, the director of the National Key Laboratory of Crop Genetic Improvement at Huazhong Agriculture University based in Wuhan, Hubei Province. Zhang is also an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The Global Times was told that officials from the Hubei Province agricultural bureau were unavailable for comment due to "business travel".

Some GM rice researchers run seed companies. Taxpayers fund their research, but they make money for themselves, Cai Hongwei, a professor with Beijing-based China Agricultural University, told the China Economic Herald.

Zhang used to be the head of a seed company before 2005 when the Bt63 GM rice was found for the first time in Hunan and Hubei provinces. The company was then closed down.

"It's no problem if GM rice experiments are done in the laboratory," said Fang Lifeng, a food and agriculture worker with Green Peace China office. "But it would be of environmental risk if it leaked out of the lab before we are absolutely sure it is safe, as it may pollute the genes of other rice species if the GM rice technology is not mature and stable. And the pollution to the natural rice gene resources of China, which has a host of wild rice species, could not possibly be undone.

"And the current research can not fully answer people's questions and concerns about the GM food's security, and there is no settled conclusion as of whether the GM food is safe for human beings in the long run," Fang added.

China is the world's largest rice producer and consumer, and in November 2009 became the first country to issue a safety certificate for GM rice technology. Rice accounts for about 60 percent of China's staple food consumption.

Covert safety certificates

In spite of the leak of GM rice seeds, Zhang's Bt63 team was not punished, but was rewarded instead.

Genetically modified organism (GMO) safety certificates were granted for Bt63 and another GM rice species invented by Zhang Qifa's laboratory November last year, though a notice that they were done so was released on an obscure, rarely updated website called China Biosafety, and not on the Ministry of Agriculture's website.

Media only discovered the notice in March this year, and no information was made public before the MOA issued the two certificates.

Meanwhile, the MOA withheld the names of the members of the Genetically Modified Foods Commission, which approved the certificates, as a "State secret."

"We have no way to know how many members of the commission are GM crop researchers, and how many of them are environmentalists or food security experts," Fang said. "Or so to say, we do not know who the gatekeeper is for 1.3 billion people's food security."

So far, the MOA has released neither an assessment report nor research findings on GM rice. Repeated calls by the Global Times to the MOA for comment were not answered.

Pest control problems

Bt cotton, a GM cotton with a 95 percent use rate in northern China, was approved for commercial use in 1997 in China to control Helicoverpa armigera or cotton bollworm, a moth larvae that is a major cotton pest.

Bt cotton, akin to Bt63 rice, is designed to reduce insecticide usage by inserting an anti-pest gene into cotton that enables the plant to generate a protein lethal to the cotton bollworm.

However, the GM cotton did not do as good a job of pest control and reducing insecticide usage as farmers had hoped, said Fang.

Cotton growers could save insecticide and get a higher output in the first two or three years of planting GM cotton, but they would have to pick up spray guns again as secondary pests would boom due to the reduction of insecticide, said Fang.

The Monsanto connection

Zhang's team bought about 10 to 12 patents for Bt63 technology from the US-based multinational agricultural giant Monsanto, according to Green Peace. A resource close to Zhang's team, who declined to be named, also said that the key technology of Zhang's Bt63 comes from Monsanto.

About 99 percent of Argentina's soybean crop is controlled by Monsanto, which sells its patented seeds to the nation's farmers.

"Soybeans are not a staple food, but rice is. Just imagine what it would be like if China's paddy rice seeds were in Monsanto's hand," Fang said. "Thus we should be more cautious when it comes to GM rice, a food-must for most of China's population of 1.3 billion."