On Monday, Nov. 18, a U.S. GMO corn shipment was rejected by Chinese investigators because it is not approved for import, according to a report from Reuters.
The rejected variety of GMO corn was Syngenta’s Agrisure Viptera, which was a part of one shipment.
The type of corn has not yet been approved in China although it could be later this year.
China is expected to import record amounts of corn in the near future according to the article and buys much of its imports from the United States.
Several countries ban the cultivation of GMO corn, although imports are much more common.
Shipments containing GMOs have been rejected previously in the past, including in May of this year when three of them were destroyed upon entry into China. China’s government is reportedly looking to ramp up GMO sales, however, after many years of disagreements over the highly controversial crops.
Despite other countries’ safety precautions and rejections of GMOs, they are still unlabeled and widely grown in the United States; and a recent report showed that GMO cross-contamination is becoming more and more widespread of non-GMO crops.
Shipment issues show how hard GMOs are to track
Monday’s news was just another drop in the bucket to many, but it shows yet again just how hard it is to track genetically modified crops, which have silently been forced into our food supply without adequate testing and without the public’s consent.
Since GMO crops look just like their “conventional” counterparts, tracking them is exceedingly difficult.
Cross contamination is of course another major problem with GMOs. Considering that GMO companies such as Monsanto have no problems suing small farmers for patent infringement due to accidental pollen drift that they never even wanted in the first place, it’s easy to see why new regulations must be placed on GMO companies at the very least to provide the contamination of the food chain.
A recent victory for the movement in Kauai, Hawaii after a City Council vote helped to override the mayor’s veto is one positive step and a blueprint for activists. It calls for disclosure of all GMO crops being grown on Kauai, restrictions and buffer zones on pesticides and more.
But recent developments continue to suggest that it’s clear that more must be done to stop the unlabeled and uncontainable spread of GMOs that we are currently facing before nature becomes fundamentally altered, in unforeseen ways.
Agrisure Viptera, designed to offer enhanced protection against crop-damaging insects, is widely grown in the United States so traces of the grain may have been commingled with approved corn strains in a shipment to China, traders said.
A bulk corn shipment from Argentina was cleared for import earlier this year despite it containing traces of MIR 162.
China is expected to import a record-high 7 million tonnes of corn in the 2013/14 (Sept/Aug) marketing year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
After shifting from a corn exporter to a net importer in 2010, China has become on of the world’s top three corn markets, buying nearly all of its imports from top exporter the United States.
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About Nick Meyer
