WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - Corn seed about to be sold to farmers for this year's
crop was found to be contaminated by traces of a genetically modified
variety of the grain that prompted massive recalls last year,
the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
Quoting
government and industry sources, the Post said seed companies
detected the contamination while testing their stocks to make
sure the seed was free of the engineered corn, known as StarLink,
approved in the U.S. only for animal feed.
StarLink
is not approved for human consumption because of concerns about
potential allergic reactions. It was found in taco shells in
September, leading to an eventual recall of more than 300 food
products.
The Post
said the newly discovered 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 Post said.
Representatives
of the seed industry and other corn and food industry officials
were scheduled to meet Thursday with officials from the three
federal agencies that oversee agricultural biotechnology, the
Post reported.
``There
may be low levels of the StarLink protein in some non-StarLink
hybrid corn seed,'' an Agriculture Department official told
the Post. Those attending Thursday's meeting will ''look into
the issue and further evaluate what steps may be necessary to
address it,'' the newspaper said.
Industry
sources told the Post that it was unclear how the seed corn
came to contain the StarLink protein, called Cry9c. The sources
were also quoted as saying the level of Cry9c being found in
corn seed is very low.
StarLink's
developer, Aventis CropScience, a unit of Franco-German life
science firm Aventis SA, maintains the corn is safe for human
consumption. The pharmaceutical giant has asked the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (news - web sites) to approve StarLink retroactively
for human use to avert future disruptions of the corn supply,
but the agency is under intense pressure from critics of biotechnology
to keep the ban on human use, the Post said.
