Chinese officials have approved a strain of genetically engineered rice, placing the country in position to be first in the world to produce biotech rice on a commercial scale. China's Ministry of Agriculture in December said it had issued safety certificates for the rice but that additional production trials are required before full commercialization can begin. The trials may take two to three years. The rice variety, engineered to fend off pests with toxins from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) was developed by scientists at Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan, China. News of the approval came in November, only a week after Chinese officials had announced approval of the country's first transgenic maize. The feed crop is engineered to produce phytase, an enzyme that helps animals better utilize phosphorus in maize. China's most widely grown transgenic crop, Bt cotton, was approved in 1997. China isn't the first nation to approve biotech rice, but it may be the first to commercialize it. US regulatory officials in 1999 approved, or deregulated, Bayer CropScience's transgenic herbicide-tolerant rice, but the North Carolina-based company never commercialized it. “Farmers are concerned that it will hurt their export markets,” in countries that don't allow transgenic rice, says Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist at Cambridge, Massachusetts–based Union of Concerned Scientists. Farmers' fears were realized in 2006 when an unapproved transgenic rice variety contaminated US commercial rice, resulting in lost exports.