Editors, Progressive Farmer / Wednesday, October 18, 2000
At Mission Foods in Irving, Texas, they still aren't sure how much product
they will have to recall to include every yellow corn product that might
contain StarLink genetic material.
"We're not sure yet," says spokesman Peter Pitts. "We're not sure what's on
the shelf and we're not sure what will be brought in by customers from home."
The company is one of the largest suppliers of taco shells, tortillas, taco
chips and other products in the U.S., supplying 35 national and local
chains under several brand names and store labels. A month ago a coalition
of activist groups announced they had tested Taco Bell brand taco shells
off grocery store shelves and found them to contain StarLink material.
StarLink is the only genetically modified seed on the market in the United
States that is approved for animal feed and industrial uses but was not
approved for direct human consumption.
Though detection of StarLink material has been found only in taco shells
thus far, Mission is going beyond that to recall all yellow corn products
and switch to white corn. Would such a move be necessary if StarLink is
disappearing from the market anyway? "You have to act with an abundance of
caution," says Pitts.
The discovery by the Genetically Engineered Food Alert prompted Aventis,
StarLink's maker, to stop selling any new seed and to announce they would
buy back the 2000 StarLink crop from producers at a 25-cent premium. Then
last week the EPA announced Aventis had agreed to cancel its license to
sell the corn at all. That news was a reversal from earlier in the week
when an Aventis official said the company planned to continue to seek
approval for human consumption as it has for the past three years.
The EPA has consistently declined to approve StarLink for human consumption
because its scientists believe there is a chance -- a small chance -- that
the specific Bt variety used in StarLink could trigger allergic reactions
in humans. StarLink was grown on approximately 350,000 acres this year by
some 3,000 growers. Aventis estimates it will end up buying back as much as
45 million bushels of corn. A number of those growers claim they were never
made aware that StarLink wasn't approved for food uses and required a
buffer zone. As a result, some StarLink corn has already been mingled with
other hybrids both on the farm and in the processing chain.
Given the grain handling system in the U.S., it was only a matter of time
before StarLink got in the food system, according to Charles Hurburgh, a
grain quality specialist at Iowa State University. "It was gonna happen. It
was gonna get in the food chain one way or another," he says. "Without any
economic incentive [to separate StarLink from other corn], split approval
was a prescription for trouble."
Meanwhile, the EPA and FDA with oversight over pesticides and food safety,
respectively, have been taking heat for allowing this to happen and have
said very little other than that they are conducting their own tests.
