By BRIAN BERTHIAUME

10/31 The much-maligned brand of Bt corn, StarLink, has become the poster child for anti-biotech sentiment. The corn’s designer, Aventis SA, has taken some heavy lumps over the past two months, both nationally and globally.
Since the GMO opposition group Genetically Engineered Food Alert proved the presence of StarLink in taco shells on Sept. 18, a steady ripple of discord has spread throughout related industries.
Marketwide recall efforts were instituted by Kraft Foods to retrieve its shells. Safeway Inc. pulled suspect products from its store shelves. Mission Foods Co., the largest U.S. manufacturer of tortilla products, levied its own recall on its tortillas, taco shells and snack chips. Azteca Milling, which supplied the flour for both Mission Foods and Kraft taco shells, recalled all of its flour made with yellow corn. ConAgra Foods Inc. put a hold on milling operations at its Kansas corn processing plant to test for StarLink. Now Kellogg Co. has shut down a plant in Memphis, Tenn., because it could not guarantee that its grain supply was free from the corn.
At the “strong urging” of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Aventis has cancelled the registration of StarLink corn, promising that no new crops will be planted for agricultural purposes. Although the majority of the corn comes from the Midwest, 690 acres are grown in Maryland’s Cecil and Harford Counties.
According to the company, they have successfully retrieved 88 percent of the corn, leaving just over a million bushels still at large. However, there are recent reports of StarLink surfacing in food and feed corn supplies in Japan, which has strict regulations pertaining to the use of non-Japanese approved biotech. Potentially, prison time could result.
“It’s a mess,” said Lynne Hoot, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Grain Producers Association. “And, as is typical, it’s the farmers who are going to suffer.”
Aventis is now leading a charge to have StarLink approved for human consumption, and has submitted data to the EPA to that regard. StarLink is the only variety of Bt corn that contains a protein called Cry9C, which exhibits some of the characteristics of known allergens. The protein has been the stumbling block in the path of StarLink’s approval. However, EPA and the USDA have no confirmed reports of allergic reactions resulting from eating foods made with StarLink.
The approval measure is widely viewed as a legal tourniquet for the government and corporate agriculture — a quick-fix measure for a global snafu. EPA Deputy Assistant Administrator Stephen Johnson said this incident makes it “unlikely” that they would approve another GMO that was not meant for human consumption.
Hoot agreed, saying, “From our perspective, the product should never have been approved for just animal feed. That’s why it’s come back to haunt us. It’s difficult to identify these crops quickly; we’re just not set up to have one line for animal feed only.”
Jamie Jameson, president of the National Production and Stewardship Committee for the National Corn Growers Association, said, “Producers can keep the two lines of corn separate, but there are a lot of hoops to jump through to do it.
“We question whether Aventis did their job,” Jamison continued. “Did the company do enough to inform the individual growers? There were decisions made in a corporate boardroom that should have been made in a different environment.
“What’s most important now is to figure out what we have to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again. We believe that all crops of this nature must receive food grade approval first. You can’t just dump this on the world market. You’re gonna get it, come hell or high water,” the Maryland farmer said.
Not surprisingly, politicians have seized on the issue. Democrats are clamoring for stricter regulations and mandatory labelling, while Republicans insist that consumer education will allay the public’s fear of GMOs.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said, “We simply don’t have a system in place to catch the misuse of genetically modified ingredients. We don’t even have a system that requires mandatory safety tests.”
Boxer wants to introduce legislation that would require biotech companies to conduct government-prescribed safety tests, and to create warning labels for products containing genetically modified ingredients.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said he plans to push a bill requiring the Food and Drug Administration to monitor foods from the farm to the grocery store, thus to ensure GM products were not “inappropriately” getting into the food supply.
Republicans cited the public’s lack of knowledge on biotech as the reason for “alarmist sentiment.”
Sen. James Jeffords (R-Vt.) said, “The irony of this controversy is a growing wariness on the part of consumers about food that, to date, government, academia and some consumer groups have declared safe.”