China To Investigate Illegal GM Rice

The Chinese Ministry of Agriculture has initiated an investigating after the environmental group, Greenpeace recently announced that they found unauthorized genetically modified rice from the United States for sale in a Beijing supermarket.

Although rice is the staple food for much of China’s population, the sale or import of GM rice is illegal in the country.

Greenpeace found the GM rice by collecting ten samples of US food from two supermarkets in Beijing. One of the samples contained the Liberty Link strain of GM rice created by Bayer Crop Science. Liberty Link strain had led to a sharp decline in U.S. rice exports after its discovery in U.S. commercial rice supplies last year.