Japan could resume buying wheat from the United States, following a series of meetings between Japanese agriculture ministry officials and importers who handle western white wheat.

Trade could resume as early as this week, after the US authorities supplied trade partners with the means of detecting a strain of genetically modified wheat. Japan, along with other major importers including South Korea and Taiwan suspended imports of US white wheat after the US Department of Agriculture announced that unlicensed genetically modified wheat plants had been found growing in a field in Oregon in late May.

Anonymous industry sources told news agency Reuters on Monday (29 July) that US exports to Japan could resume imminently. The Japanese ministry said it would only resume trade if tests were conducted for the presence of GM wheat both on departure from the US and arrival in Japan.

Imports into South Korea resumed several weeks ago.

Japan is the largest buyer of white wheat, which is mainly used to make cakes and biscuits. The country imports around 800,000 tonnes of the wheat each year, usually from the United States, but officials began looking elsewhere this year after the incident in Oregon.

The rupture was triggered by the USDA's announcement on 29 May that a small number of volunteer wheat plants in Oregon had been identified as belonging to a variety of GM wheat, engineered to be resistant to glyphosate herbicide and trialled widely across the United States between 1998 and 2005.  The wheat, Monsanto's MON71800, was scrapped due to a lack of demand; it was never submitted for licensing.

However, although it is now almost four months since the GM wheat was first found, officials still do not know how it came to be growing in the Oregon field. Monsanto claims the discovery is the result of sabotage by anti-biotech activists intending to undermine faith in GM crops, though the company's theory has found little support amongst plant scientists.

Officials in the USDA watchdog APHIS commented "USDA has neither found nor been informed of anything that would indicate that this incident amounts to more than a single isolated incident in a single field on a single farm. All information collected so far shows no indication of the presence of GE wheat in commerce. Investigators are conducting a thorough review."