The Chinese buyer of the first U.S. soybeans shipment this season said quarantine inspections might take as long as a month, but traders, both foreign and Chinese, said this week they see no delays in the cargo's discharge.

"We haven't released the supplementary documents to the GMO rules yet," Liu told Reuters on the sidelines of an agricultural conference. "We are making all efforts working on the details and finding the most convenient way to handle the issue."

China released new GMO rules on June 6, but failed to say how they would be implemented.

That brought orders for U.S. soybeans, 70 percent of which are bio-engineered, to a virtual halt as traders feared cargoes might not pass new and stricter regulations.

Traders are still waiting for China to tell them how to obtain a required GMO certificate and whether it should be done before ordering or ahead of shipment.

NO ILL INTENTIONS

"The issuance of GMO regulations is not designed to disrupt normal trade and is in line with international practice," Liu said.

The Sino-U.S. soybeans trade is worth some $1 billion a year, an American Soybean Association official said last month.

Liu said he had been assured by a Chinese quarantine chief that soybean cargoes would not face unusually cumbersome checks.

"The quarantine official told me that they are not going to give the imports big problems during inspection," Liu said.

However, a quarantine official told Reuters on Monday it might take about a month before the U.S. cargo of soybeans which arrived at the northern port of Yantai last weekend could be delivered. The buyer told Reuters yesterday that was also his view of how long it would take to clear the cargo, which was ordered before the new GMO rules were announced.

"We expect the quarantine inspection to take about a month, as some items cannot be tested locally and samples have to be tested in Beijing," the buyer said.

"Samples sometimes have to queue for a week in Beijing to be tested," he said.