San Diego

Plans to step up cultivation of rice that is genetically modified to yield pharmaceuticals are sparking fierce opposition from some environmental scientists and farmers in California.

On 29 March, the California Rice Commission decided by 6 votes to 5 to advise the state's food and agriculture department to let Ventria Bioscience of Sacramento grow about 50 hectares of the rice at sites near San Diego. The department is expected to make a final decision later this month — approval would mean the rice could be planted immediately for harvest in the autumn.

Ventria wants to grow two types of rice, one modified to produce the human protein lactoferrin, which can be used to treat anaemia, and the other yielding lysozyme, an antimicrobial that is used to fight diarrhoea. In each case, it plans to grow about 60 tonnes of rice that would be processed to make 600 kg of the protein.

The sites have been chosen because of their remoteness from commercial rice farms in northern California. But some farmers claim that the rice, which isn't meant for human or animal consumption, could still cross-pollinate with food crops via migratory birds or through the water supply. Critics also say that perceptions of such a risk could damage California's rice exports to Japan and Europe, which were worth about $500 million last year.

“We are opposed to the use of food crops as platforms to produce chemicals,” says Bryce Lundberg of Lundberg Family Farms in Richvale, which grows about 1,400 hectares of rice, some of it by organic methods.

Prospects of growing crops in the United States with transgenes added to produce drugs have suffered several setbacks, including a possible case of contamination of soya beans and maize in Iowa in 2002, which resulted in a $250,000 fine for the Texas-based producer, ProdiGene.

Ventria's crop has been billed as the first of its type in California — although the company has already been growing the rice experimentally in the state for about five years. It also has experimental plots in Hawaii.

The company's chief executive, Scott Deeter, says that the firm grew 16 hectares of the rice last year at undisclosed locations in California. The US Department of Agriculture permitted these experiments, on condition the rice be grown at least 30 metres from conventional rice.