The Monsanto Wheat Mystery

Agriculture investigators have a mystery involving a Monsanto Genetically Modified wheat strain that was never approved for use, but appeared in a small portion of a 125 acre wheat field in Eastern Oregon.  Neither Monsanto or the U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service can come up with a plausible reason why the wheat was there.  It had been grown experimentally in Oregon in 2001, but not in that field, and was thought to have been eradicated completely.

The discovery has put all Northwest wheat exports on hold, as the foreign buyers in Europe, Japan and South Korea will not allow any NW wheat into their countries until it has been certified to be non-GMO wheat. 

Monsanto floated a story that they thought eco-terrorists were responsible.

"There's a lot of potential for how it could have got into the supply," said Carol Mallory-Smith, a professor of weed sciences at Oregon State University. "It could have already been processed. It could have gone for animal feed somewhere or it could have gone for something else. It could have gone for storage."

While Monsanto's chief technology officer suggested eco-activists were to blame, Mallory-Smith said deliberate contamination was the least likely scenario:

The sabotage conspiracy theory is even harder for me to explain or think as logical because it would mean that someone had that seed and was holding that seed for 10 or 12 years and happened to put it on the right field to have it found, and identified. I don't think that makes a lot of sense.

She was also sceptical of Monsanto's claims to have gathered up or destroyed every last seed from its earlier GM wheat trials. In recent years, as American farmers rely increasingly on GM crops, there have been a spate of such escapes, including rice, corn, soybean, and tomato. Oregon is still trying to contain a 2006 escape of GM bentgrass, used on golf courses, which has migrated 13 miles from where it was originally planted.

Monsanto could be on the hook for big damage claims filed by NW farmers over the contamination. The wheat export market is worth billions of dollars in exports.