Corn Seed Tainted With Engineered Variety

Corn seed about to be sold to farmers for this year’s crop has been contaminated by small amounts of a genetically engineered variety of the grain that prompted massive recalls of food and crops last year, government and industry sources said Wednesday.

Seed companies detected the contamination while testing their stocks to make sure the seed was free of the engineered corn, known as StarLink, which was approved only for animal consumption because of concerns about its safety for humans.

The contamination does not pose any immediate public health threat because none of the seed has been planted. But if the contamination 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.

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 Wednesday. Those attending Thursday’s meeting will “look into the issue and further evaluate what steps may be necessary to address it.”

The worried reaction to the contamination illustrates how controversial and sensitive the issue of genetically engineered crops has become. While most scientific organizations have concluded they are safe, there is widespread public concern in Europe and Japan that genetically modified crops could cause unforseen environmental and human health problems, and there is some evidence that concerns are growing in the United States as well.

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 Wednesday that it was unclear how the seed corn came to contain the StarLink protein, called Cry9c. Federal regulators have required farmers growing genetically modified crops to plant buffer crops of non-modified plants because of concerns that pollen would drift onto nearby fields and cross-breed with conventional crops.