StarLink Déjà Vu

Altered Grain Discovered In Corn Seed Same Variety Caused Big Recall Last Year

Washington Post 1mar01

Washington -- Seed corn about to be sold to farmers for this year's crop has been found to contain small amounts of a genetically engineered variety of the grain that prompted huge recalls of food and crops last year, government and industry sources said yesterday.

Seed companies made the discovery while testing their stocks for presence of the engineered corn, known as StarLink, which was approved only for animal consumption because of concerns about its safety for humans.

There is no immediate public health threat because none of the seed has been planted. But if the problem is found to be widespread, farmers and grain exporters fear it could be devastating because major buyers of American corn in Europe and Asia have said they will refuse to buy any corn suspected of being tainted by StarLink. The United States exported $5.6 billion in corn in 1999.

Ships filled with American corn were turned back from Japan last year after officials found StarLink in the shipments. The Agriculture Department recently reported that corn exports have declined this year, and analysts have pointed to StarLink as the reason why.

In response, alarmed representatives from the seed industry and other corn and food industry officials are scheduled to meet today with officials from the three federal agencies that oversee agricultural biotechnology.

"There may be low levels of (the StarLink protein) in some non-StarLink hybrid corn seed," an Agriculture Department official confirmed yesterday. Those attending today's meeting will "look into the issue and further evaluate what steps may be necessary to address it."

StarLink contains a gene spliced in to produce a form of a protein naturally made by a bacterium called bacillus thuringienis, or Bt. The protein kills the destructive European corn borer. Other genetically engineered crops on the market contain forms of the Bt protein, but those have been approved for both human and animal use, avoiding the problem that StarLink caused.

Industry sources said yesterday that it was unclear how the seed corn came to contain the StarLink protein. Federal regulators have required farmers of genetically modified crops to plant buffer crops of nonmodified plants because of concerns that pollen would drift onto nearby fields and cross-breed with conventional crops.

The creator of StarLink, Aventis CropScience, maintains the corn is safe for human consumption and has asked the Environmental Protection Agency to approve it retroactively for human use to avoid future disruptions.

But the agency is under intense pressure by critics of biotechnology to keep the ban on human use in place. The EPA has declined to approve StarLink for humans so far because the protein breaks down more slowly than similar biotech products, raising fears that it could cause dangerous allergic reactions.