-Caveat Lector-
The GM Food Segregation
(This is a very interesting article. --SW)
Fantasy - The Starlink Disaster
http://www.purefood.org/gefood/genefoodseg.cfm
2-27-1
Just about everybody ignored the safety rules on a kind
of biotech corn called Starlink. Luckily, no one died
from
eating it. But what if someone had? by Brian 0'Reilly
For anyone in the business of growing corn, one of the
biggest frustrations of the job is a brown inchworm-like
creature that spends most of the summer and fall
munching and tunneling through the corn, only to emerge
as a moth that flies off to spawn a lot more inchworms.
Like many adolescents, corn borers can be enormously
destructive. Depending on when in the growing season
they arrive, they can damage arteries that carry moisture
to corn, or even cause the entire ear to fall off before
harvest. The borer costs American farmers and their $20
billion corn crop upwards of $1 billion a year, if you
count
diminished yields plus the price of pesticides and other
measures needed to keep the borer at bay.
So in 1995, when scientists produced an early variety of
genetically modified corn that poisoned the borer shortly
after its first cornstalk casserole, farmers fairly
jumped for
joy. But last summer, right in the middle of the harvest,
things got messy. Plant Genetics Systems, a company
now owned by Aventis, a giant European
pharmaceuticals firm, had developed another
borer-killing gene that it called Starlink. However, the
toxin that Starlink produced in the corn plant resembled
a
substance that triggers violent allergies in some people.
When federal regulators threatened to ban Starlink corn
until its safety in humans could be established, the
developers thought they had a better idea. In effect,
they
promised to sell Starlink seed only to farmers using it
for
feed corn; in turn, the farmers would agree not to sell
the
seed to anyone who would put it in human food. Okay,
said the feds. But be careful.
Well, guess what? Almost everybody involved screwed
up. Even though Starlink was on the market for just three
years-and made up just 0.5% of the 80 million acres of
corn planted in the U.S. last year-it began showing up in
all sorts of places it didn't belong, including tacos,
corn
chips, breweries, and muffin mix. The promises made by
Starlink's inventors proved worthless, falling prey to
managerial inattention, corporate mergers, blind faith,
misplaced hope, woeful ignorance, political activism, and
probably greedy farmers too, if you can imagine such a
thing.
Any batch of core destined for human consumption must
now be ground up and tested for the StarLink gene.
The episode hardly qualifies as a disaster, since no one
seems to have gotten seriously ill from eating Starlink
corn. Howard Buffett, son of Warren and a farmer near
Decatur, Ill., even sees a bright side to it; he says
Starlink has revealed the shortcomings of federal
oversight and has pointed up the inability of the
grain-handling industry to segregate subtly different
products. Still, Starlink has caused no end of hassles
for
farmers, grain-elevator operators, railroads, and food
processors. Neil Harl, an agricultural economist at Iowa
State University, calls it "the biggest assault on
American
agriculture I have ever witnessed." Altogether, the
fiasco
could cost Aventis half a billion dollars.
The long-term consequences may be more severe. So
far Americans have been much more accepting of
genetically modified food than the rest of the world. If
Starlink triggers hysteria among Americans, the world's
biggest appetite for that promising technology will
shrink,
and the whole science will be retarded for years. If
foreign food processors that buy U.S. agricultural
commodities worry that American grain glows in the dark,
they will turn even more to Brazil and other countries
for
their food, and U.S. farm prices, already depressed, will
fall further.
Harvest of Trouble Starlink seeds were planted on just
350, 000 of America's 80 million acres of com last year,
mostly in the upper Midwest.
1-1,000 acres 1,001 - 10,000 acres 10,000 - 100,000
acres Iowa: 135,000 acres
One of the more surprising revelations of the Starlink
mess isn't that genetically modified food h0as suddenly
appeared in the food supply, but rather how much such
food is already out there. Most of us have heard about
such oddities as strawberries protected from frost
damage by a gene transplanted from an arctic fish. But
did you know that genetically modified soybeans now
account for 60% of all soy grown in the U.S.? Called
Roundup Ready, the plants were developed by
Monsanto to tolerate Roundup, one of the company's
weed-killers. Says Gary Niery, a farmer in central
Illinois:
"Before Roundup, we used to use a quart of herbicide
per acre. Now it's just ounces." Similarly engineered soy
plants, including LibertyLink from Aventis, are sold by
other companies.
Close on the heels of Roundup Ready soy came another
kind of genetically altered plant: one that produced its
own pesticide. That's where the Starlink story begins.
For nearly 30 years farmers have sprayed crops with
solutions derived from a soil bacterium called Bacillus
thuringiensis. This so-called Bt spray is harmless to
humans but quite effective against a variety of pests,
including corn borers. However, it doesn't kill all corn
borers, especially those that often show up in a second
wave of infestation in midsummer. In 1995 seed
companies such as Pioneer Hi-Bred and DeKalb won
approval to sell corn genetically altered to produce the
pesticide found in soil bacteria; this seed killed nearly
99% of corn borers. About 18% of corn planted in the
U.S. last year was of the Bt variety.
One bag of seed corn (enough to plant 2 acres) costs
$90; Bt corn costs an additional $15 per bag. Corn-borer
infestations vary widely from year to year, depending on
wind and rain. If infestations are mild, it's cheaper to
fight
the borer with sprays. But in broad swaths of the
Cornbelt where the borer is a chronic problem, the Bt
varieties of seed are more economical. Roughly a quarter
of the corn grown last year in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska,
and Minnesota was of the Bt type; the figure was 35% in
South Dakota.
Pioneer and DeKalb's head start in the Btengineered
crop business worried Aventis, a $20billion-a-year
French pharmaceuticals and agricultural sciences
company formed last year by the merger of
Rhône-Poulenc and Hoechst. Although most of Aventis'
revenues come from drugs such as Allegra, a
prescription antihistamine, the company's crop-sciences
division had sales of $4 billion last year, making it
one of
the biggest agproducts operations in the world. At least
some Aventis officials had big hopes for genetic
engineering. "We were spending $450 million a year on
R&D in the agricultural division," says an executive who,
like all Aventis officials interviewed by FORTUNE,
declined to be identified. "We had gone about as far as
you could fighting weeds and pests with chemicals and
needed to make a big shift to biotechnology." Even
before their companies merged, executives at
Rhone-Poulenc and Hoechst worried that rivals were
grabbing market share in key agricultural technologies
that would be difficult to win back later.
Buried in the welter of corporate subentities created by
the RhônePoulenc/Hoechst combination was a small
Belgian company called Plant Genetics, which Hoechst
had acquired in 1996. Corporate life cannot have been
easy for the managers and scientists at Plant Genetics,
who had been working for a decade on a Bt variety of
corn. Four years before the Aventis merger, Hoechst had
formed a joint venture with Schering, the U.S. drug
company. Plant Genetics was acquired by the joint
venture, called Agrevo, which was later folded again into
a division of Aventis. The point here is less the details
than the big picture. There was lots of upheaval at Plant
Genetics-its tiny U.S. headquarters moved through three
cities in four years. It is reasonable to assume, too,
that
operational details surrounding a corn gene were hardly
the most important concern of senior Aventis executives
trying to manage a $20 billion merger. Until it was too
late.
Although scientists at Plant Genetics were a few years
behind the competition, they were excited about what
they had created: a variety of the Bt protein that
destroyed a different part of the corn borer's gut. This
was important because an additional vulnerability would
make it harder for the corn borer to develop resistance
to
Bt pesticides. The Bt variety created in Starlink corn
was
called Cry9. (Bt proteins have a crystalline shape, so
different varieties were called Cry1, Cry2, etc.) Aventis
scientists thought Cry9 was a winner that would make
them significant players in the next generation of
agricultural products. Federal regulators in the U.S.
were
more cautious.
David Witherspoon of Garst Seed Co. holds a genetically
altered seedling. Garst was the biggest seller of
Starlink.
In the early 1980s, when the prospect of bioengineered
crops first emerged, people from numerous U.S.
government agencies met to discuss how to regulate the
products. They agreed that the Department of Agriculture
would determine whether a new plant was safe to grow
outdoors: Would it run amok, for example, and harm
other plants or animals? If a genetically altered plant
was
supposed to produce a pesticide, the Environmental
Protection Agency would decide whether the plant was
safe in food. The Food and Drug Administration would
enforce the food safety standards established by the
EPA.
In 1997, when EPA scientists were evaluating Starlink,
they saw something they hadn't seen in other brands of
Bt corn. Starlink's Cry9 protein didn't dissolve in
stomach
acid as quickly as proteins in other Bt varieties. Nor
did it
break down as rapidly during cooking or processing. This
meant that the Cry9 protein, unlike the others, might
stay
in the stomach long enough to be passed intact into the
bloodstream, where it could trigger an allergic reaction.
"Other Bt proteins lasted only a few seconds in simulated
gastric juices," says Stephen Johnson, deputy assistant
administrator of the EPA in charge of pesticide
regulations. "This broke down much more slowly." In
other tests, however, the Cry9 protein seemed fine. "We
looked at the structure of the molecule and asked if it
walked and talked like other known allergens," says
Johnson. "It did not. So we were faced with two of three
studies saying there was something different about this
pesticide. We decided we couldn't allow it in food
without
more tests."
Starlink's developers, eager to market their product,
invoked a little-known EPA rule that allows some
pesticides and herbicides to be used on feed for animals
but not on food destined for humans. This "split
registration" had never been sought for genetically
modified products. Johnson notes. "We looked at each
other and said, 'What do we know about allergens? We
know they don't pass through cattle.' We spoke to USDA
and FDA, and they said [Starlink] passes the standard.
We didn't feel real comfortable with it. But the law
prevents us from saying, `We don't like your product.' So
we allowed it but put restrictions on it." For their
caution,
Johnson says, "we were denounced as pointy-headed
regulators."
The restrictions on Starlink corn were severe. It could
be
grown only for animal feed or for nonfood use, such as
conversion to ethanol. Because regulators worried that
windblown pollen from Starlink stalks could pass the
Cry9 gene to ordinary corn, farmers had to leave
660-foot buffer strips around their Starlink fields.
Farmers
bringing the corn to market had to notify grain elevators
that it could not be used in human food. The EPA
ordered Starlink's developers to require all farmers who
bought the seed to sign a form affirming that they
understood the restrictions and would abide by them.
The company also promised to conduct a "statistically
valid" survey of Starlink growers to ensure they were
following the rules. Finally, says Johnson, "the company
agreed to accept full liability if anything went wrong."
Neither Aventis nor its predecessor companies ever
produced much Starlink corn. Instead they inserted the
newly spliced genes into small amounts of corn and sold
the resulting sprouts to recd companies. These then
planted Starlink in greenhouses, harvested the corn, and
replanted it to create more seed. Eventually the seed
companies contracted with farmers who grow large
volumes of corn for seed under controlled conditions
outdoors. Once that seed was harvested, the companies
had enough Starlink seed to begin marketing.
Ultimately, about a dozen small seed companies licensed
Starlink corn from Plant Genetics. The Garst Seed Co.,
which is near Des Moines and has one of the longest
pedigrees in the seed business, produced the vast
majority of Starlink corn, according to Aventis
executives.
Garst, as is common with smaller seed companies, relies
heavily on "farmer dealers" to sell its products. These
are
usually farmers who use the slow winter months to
schmooze relatives and neighbors into buying a few
thousand dollars' worth of seed. In 1998, the first year
Starlink was on the market, just 10,000 acres were
planted. Last year a mere 350,000 of America's 79.6
million acres of corn were Starlink. The highest
concentration of Starlink in any state last year was 1.1
%
in Iowa, Garst's backyard.
Nevertheless, the proliferation of Bt corn was causing
growing concern outside the Farmbelt. In April 1999 an
entomology professor at Cornell University researching
corn-borer resistance to Bt reported that he had fed a
diet of corn pollen to monarch butterflies' larvae. Many
of
the monarchs that ate Bt pollen died. This caused a furor
among environmentalists, who admire the monarch for its
yearly migration from Mexico and back. Many
environmentalists are profoundly worried about all
genetically altered plants and animals, fearful that they
contain health hazards that won't become apparent for
years, or that they will somehow reproduce wildly and
overwhelm ordinary species. For environmentalists, the
monarch was about to become the poster butterfly of the
anti-Frankenfood movement.
Among the environmentalists who led the charge against
Bt corn was Larry Bohlen, an engineer by training and a
senior official in the Washington office of Friends of
the
Earth. For years FOE and other greens had been trying
to get the U.S. government to sign international
protocols
on the use of genetically modified organisms. "When the
Cornell study on monarch butterflies came out, we had
our first tangible example of the kind of impact genetic
crops could have," says Bohlen. He wrote to President
Clinton asking that use of Bt plants be suspended until
their effect on nontarget animals could be determined.
And he began writing to consumer-product companies
like Campbell's, Kellogg, and Frito-Lay, urging them to
forswear all genetically modified food. Last July the
campaign began in earnest. Bohlen arranged for popular
foods to be tested for genetically altered ingredients
"so
we could contact the manufacturers and tell them to be
more careful."
Eventually Bohlen learned about Starlink. "When I asked
grain elevator operators and farmers how Starlink and
other unapproved varieties were being segregated, I was
told that separation was difficult and that very little
segregation was being done." Bingo. Bohlen had his
galvanizing image. "By summer it seemed there was a
good chance Starlink had made it into the food supply."
In late July of last year, Bohlen went to the Safeway
near
his home in Silver Spring, Md., and filled his grocery
cart
"with all the corn products I could find." He sent them
to
Genetic ID, an Iowa lab that routinely checks commodity
shipments bound for Europe to make sure they comply
with European Union standards. In September the news
that Starlink corn had been found in tacos made by Kraft
and sold under the Taco Bell brand was splashed across
the front page of the Washington Post.
David Witherspoon, president of the Garst Seed Co.,
can't recall where he was when the news broke. That's
surprising, because if anybody should have been
electrified by the development, it was the head of Garst,
which sold nearly all the Starlink produced in the U.S.
"We were very concerned," Witherspoon now says.
Aventis executives say they were flabbergasted and
didn't believe the reports at first. A biotech industry
organization immediately questioned the reliability of
Genetic ID. But then Kraft ordered its own tests of the
tacos; it found Starlink and recalled more than a million
boxes. Other taco makers did the same. Kellogg shut
down one of its mills because it feared Starlink
contamination. Grain elevators, in the midst of gathering
the fall harvest, scrambled for ways to test arriving
truckloads for Starlink contamination. In many ways it
was too late; most of the Starlink in the nation's food
had
come from the 1999 corn crop. And because 1999 had
been a bumper year, there were more than a billion
bushels of unsold corn still sitting in silos. No one
knew
how much of it was mixed with Starlink.
Illinois farmer Howard Buffets (Warren's son) says
Starlink shows the difficulty of separating subtly
different
products.
How did this happen? Every farmer who had bought
Starlink signed a form agreeing to keep it out of the
human food supply, right? Well, not exactly. Many of the
2,500 Starlink farmers appear to have been clueless
about it. Hundreds claimed their seed salesmen never
told them they were buying Starlink, and certainly didn't
pass on any precautions about how to plant it. The head
of the agriculture committee of the Iowa House of
Representatives, Ralph Klemme, says he bought Starlink
but was never told it was forbidden for use in food.
Thomas Miller, the Iowa Attorney General, says "the vast
majority" of farmers did not sign any forms
acknowledging planting and marketing limits. It was not
until a few weeks after the Starlink news broke that
farmers who planted the seed received a letter asking
them to sign and return some forms; the forms appear to
have been backdated to before the spring planting.
Aventis executives vigorously deny having anything to do
with the letter. In a telephone interview, Garst CEO
Witherspoon said he would "prefer not to get into that,"
citing potential litigation.
Witherspoon insists that Garst provided information to
all
its salesmen about Starlink. Asked whether Garst
salesmen were diligent about having farmers sign the
EPA-required forms, Witherspoon was vague. "The
dealers would have started getting the forms and would
know we had them. We tried to get them to dealers. We'd
remind them to use them."
It seems unlikely that Garst's farmer salesmen would
have knowingly deceived customers. The seed business
relies heavily on the trust that exists when farmers sell
seed to relatives and neighbors. Garst is one of the
oldest companies in the business; it began in 1930 by
marketing hybrid seeds developed by Henry A. Wallace,
the founder of Pioneer Hi-Bred. (Wallace was later Vice
President under Franklin Roosevelt.) Garst was so well
known that Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev visited its
founder, Roswell Garst, on his Iowa farm in 1959. But the
company ran into trouble in the early 1980s, when
Pioneer severed its relationship with Garst to market its
own seed. Garst lost the bitter lawsuit that ensued. The
family sold the business to ICI, the British chemical
company, in 1985. (Du Pont bought Pioneer in 1999.) ICI
later spun off its U.S. seed business to Zeneca, a
British
drug company. Garst is now a part of Advanta, a joint
venture between Zeneca and Royal Vander-Have Group
in the Netherlands. Ironically, Advanta made headlines in
Europe last year when canola seeds it had sold there
were found to contain small amounts of genetically
altered material forbidden by the EU. The seeds, grown
in Canada, may have been contaminated by windblown
pollen from other canola nearby.
"I am outraged at Aventis," says Stephen Johnson of the
EPA. "This is enormously important technology. We
trusted Aventis to handle it properly, and they didn't."
Aventis eventually took responsibility for the Starlink
mess; the company is spending millions to locate the
rogue corn so that it can be put into animal feed.
Aventis
executives say that they thought Garst was spelling out
the restrictions on Starlink to farmers, but hint that
they
didn't monitor Garst carefully. Neil Harl, the
agricultural
economist at Iowa State, says he doubts Garst was
motivated to be very explicit about how Starlink had to
be
grown and sold. "What farmer would buy a variety of
seed if he was told he had to plant a 660foot buffer
strip
around it, and would have to go through all sorts of
special separation and storage after the harvest?"
Witherspoon disagrees, saying the company sent 15
mailings to Starlink farmers. As for the "statistically
significant" survey of farmer compliance that Aventis had
promised the EPA, the company appears to have
dropped the ball. Garst conducted the survey, says an
Aventis executive, but did it right after the harvest,
when
most corn was still stored on farms.
Both Garst and Aventis officials implied in interviews
that
if they failed to live up to all their agreements with
the
EPA, it was because they were convinced Starlink would
soon get full approval for use in food and that the
special
conditions would be lifted. "Aventis was working very
hard on those approvals," says Witherspoon.
If Starlink triggers hysteria about genetic food in the
U.S.,
the world's biggest appetite for that promising
technology
will dry up, and the science will be retarded for years.
Even after giving Aventis and Garst their share of the
blame, there's plenty more to go around. Johnson, the
EPA official, now concedes that a split registration for
Starlink, allowing it in feed but not food, was a dumb
idea. "It was the first and last time we will allow
that," he
says. Critics point accusingly at the FDA, which was
supposed to enforce food standards established by the
EPA. Larry Bohlen at Friends of the Earth says the FDA
didn't even have a way of testing for Starlink in food
and
that the agency moved slowly when news of the
contamination first came out. "Kraft ran circles around
the
FDA. The day Kraft pulled its tacos off the shelf, the
FDA
was faxing me to ask if I would send them some of my
taco shells. Kraft had already tested and confirmed on
multiple lots." An FDA spokeswoman declined to
comment on the agency's role in Starlink.
To its belated credit, Aventis has been aggressively
trying to locate Starlink seed. It requested Garst's
list of
Starlink customers and met with all of them within days.
Aventis is paying farmers up to 25 cents for each bushel
of Starlink seed fed to animals. When grain-elevator
owners discover that a batch of Starlink has
contaminated a million-bushel silo, Aventis negotiates
compensation for their added efforts and expense. The
company has also paid for millions of test kits used by
farmers, food processors, and grain handlers to identify
traces of Starlink. Just how much is out there is
anybody's guess. Because many farmers failed to plant
buffer strips, pollen sometimes drifted into neighbors'
fields, causing that corn to test positive. Moreover,
some
Garst seed varieties that weren't supposed to contain
Starlink turn out to have been contaminated, the
company now admits, and that adds to the difficulty of
finding it.
Even though Aventis executives don't argue with
assertions that the debacle may cost the company
hundreds of millions of dollars, Wall Street appears
unfazed. Aventis ADRs climbed from $71 to $77 between
early September and late January. Some farmers have
fared well too. Even if they planned all along to feed
the
Starlink they grew to their cattle, Aventis is paying
them a
premium for it.
But the reactions of people like Jerry Rowe are more
typical. Rowe manages the Farmers Grain Cooperative,
a four-million-bushel grain elevator in Dalton City,
Ill. He
says Starlink has greatly complicated his life. At peak
times he unloads a truck every two minutes. "The
Starlink test takes five minutes per truck, and I can't
afford to slow down." And his sampling probe could miss
Starlink lurking in a far corner of a truck. "Maybe I'll
miss
it coming in, but the customer finds it when I'm
shipping it
out," says Rowe. Corn that Rowe could sell for $2.14 a
bushel to Archer Daniels Midland in nearby Decatur
might get rejected, forcing him to spend 20 cents a
bushel to ship it to Cedar Rapids, where the pay is just
$2.06. Rowe also worries that if he finds Starlink in his
bins a year from now, Aventis won't compensate him.
Aventis claims that it will.
The long-term consequences of Starlink seed are hard to
predict. No serious health problems have emerged so
far. About three dozen people complained to the FDA
about bad reactions to corn products in the days after
Starlink first made headlines. Many clearly did not have
allergic reactions, and virtually all the rest had mild
problems like itchy eyes or a tight throat. A pediatric
allergist from Duke University told a scientific advisory
panel convened by the EPA that unless someone has an
anaphylactic reaction to Starlink, he or she does not
have a food allergy. But the panel decided that Starlink
does indeed walk and talk like a potential allergen, and
advised the EPA to turn down a request by Aventis that
small amounts of it be allowed in the food supply.
Starlink has not triggered widespread hysteria about
genetically modified food in the U.S., to the
disappointment, no doubt, of some environmental
groups. But Johnson at the EPA still worries that the
episode may slow the acceptance of genetically modified
products. "I am outraged at Aventis," he says. "This is
enormously important technology. We trusted Aventis to
handle it properly, and they didn't."
He is probably right to be concerned. Pierre Deloffre,
head of a large French vegetable-processing company,
told a seed trade convention in Chicago last December
that Europeans turned abruptly away from genetically
modified foods during the 1990s. Deloffre blames
government regulators and scientists who failed to
respond properly to Chernobyl, AIDS in the blood supply,
and mad cow disease for eroding Europeans' confidence
in technology. "Five years ago the first boatloads of
genetically modified soybeans arrived here without the
slightest reaction," says Deloffre. Now the EU barely
touches them.
Although Europe hasn't imported much American corn for
years, Japan is a large customer. The Japanese have
been fairly tolerant of bioengineered food, but they,
too,
are growing cautious. New rules that take effect in Japan
this spring will require labels on food to state if it
contains
genetically modified ingredients. An executive at ADM
says orders from Japan for unmodified corn and soy
have already begun to climb in anticipation of the new
labels.
Since it caused no serious illnesses, Starlink will
probably be a footnote in future agronomy textbooks. In
reality, though, this was a disturbingly close brush with
disaster. Starlink was probably circulating in the food
supply for a year before it was found. If it had been
slow
acting but truly dangerous, like mad cow disease, the
damage could have been enormous. Critical links in the
food chain from Aventis and Garst to thousands of small
farmers-turned out to be either unconcerned about or
oblivious to what they were selling and growing.
If we're lucky, maybe Starlink will also be a wake-up
call,
reminding us that tinkering with Mother Nature is risky
business -and that it's not just white-coated lab
technicians who must be careful. Solving the problem of
hunger and malnutrition may ultimately depend not so
much on science as on our faith in science and all its
stewards. And if you can't trust a farmer, who can you
trust?
Organic Consumers Association -
http://www.purefood.org
MainPage
http://www.rense.com
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