The discovery of 22 stalks of GMO wheat in a fallow field in Washington state “is an isolated incident,” said Monsanto, which developed the experimental strain as part of a project that was shuttered a decade ago. U.S. wheat groups also were sanguine about the incident, saying a prompt response by U.S. officials meant that “if any market disruption occurs, we think it will be short-lived.”
Authorities offered no immediate explanation of how the wheat appeared on the farm. The circumstances were similar to a 2013 incident in eastern Oregon. Each time, growers noticed “volunteer” wheat that unexpectedly survived spraying with a glyphosate weedkiller in a field that was being held out of production. The Monsanto GMO strains were engineered to tolerate glyphosate.
Solving the Washington state case may prove just as frustrating as the Oregon incident, which illuminated the difficulties of tracing movements of grain that occurred weeks or even months earlier. The USDA spent more than a year on its Oregon investigation, which included interviews with 291 wheat growers, grain elevator operators and crop consultants, as well as field test-plot researchers. The report runs nearly 13,000 pages.
“We are fully cooperating with USDA’s fact-finding into the discovery of these plants in Washington state, just as we did in Oregon in 2013,” said a Monsanto spokeswoman. When Monsanto shut down its GMO experiments in 2004-05, “the process was rigorous, well documented and audited,” she said.
The USDA provided almost no detail about the Washington state discovery or its activities before announcing the incident. U.S. Wheat Associates and the National Association of Wheat Growers said the USDA “kept our organizations, as well as government officials in several key overseas markets, informed as it worked to find the facts.” The USDA “successfully managed this situation and provided sufficient evidence that this has not affected commercial wheat supplies,” said the two groups.
As evidence of the purity of U.S. wheat exports, USW and NAWG said extensive field-testing of wheat since 2013 by Washington State University “has revealed no glyphosate-tolerant wheat plants.”
Since Jan. 1, in a tightening of its oversight of biotech tests, the USDA has required seed companies to apply for permits for test plots, rather than simply notifying the USDA of the trials, as they had done in the past. The USDA says permits are a more stringent approach that allow it to tailor the terms of the experiments and assure control of seeds and plants.