The food industry and environmentalists joined Missouri rice growers this week in their fight to prevent a California company from sowing genetically modified rice in the Missouri Bootheel.
Unlike most genetically modified crops, this rice wouldn't be destined for dinner tables but for pharmaceutical companies, which would make drugs from proteins engineered into the grain. Farmers worry that the drug-bound rice would commingle with their edible crops - worth some $100 million each year - and make them difficult to sell.
"Those people came into Missouri through the back door and cut a deal before we even knew anything was going on," said Sonny Matin, a rice farmer in Bernie, Mo. "This is a political thing with a lot of money involved."
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