page 11

issue 103
august 2003  

the starlink scandal

“What do our consumers have to say when the FDA is not there and the EPA is not there, Agriculture’s not there, but Friends of the Earth finds this out? What kind of regulatory scheme is that?”
US Senator Tom Harkin, 26 September 2000, at an emergency Senate meeting on GE food safety.

StarLink corn contamination is the perfect antidote to overconfidence in relation to GMO safety regulations. This genetically modified crop was never meant to be consumed by humans; however, due to the failure of regulation, StarLink corn ended up in thousands of popular food products.

In September 2000, Friends of the Earth, as part of the GE Food Alert Coalition, commissioned the laboratory testing of Taco Bell taco shells and found them to be contaminated with GM products not fit for human consumption. The discovery of the contaminated corn led to an immediate nation-wide recall of products, a drop in the price of US corn, and a drop in US corn exports to Japan.

In the years following the initial exposure of the StarLink contamination, a number of court cases have been settled with multimillion dollar payouts. Aventis CropScience and several food manufacturers including Kraft Foods Inc agreed to pay US$9 million dollars to consumers who brought a class action lawsuit against them, alleging that genetically modified StarLink corn caused allergic reactions. In a separate suit, StarLink Logistics and Advanta USA agreed to pay $110 million to farmers whose crops were contaminated by StarLink corn, or who suffered from a drop in corn prices related to the StarLink incident.

It is alarming that the US regulations that were supposed to guard against contamination by products like StarLink utterly failed. And StarLink corn didn’t just affect US consumers: in December 2002, over a year after the initial contamination, Japanese investigators discovered StarLink in a shipment of US corn bound for Tokyo’s food supply. Similarly, StarLink contamination was discovered in Korea and in a package of US Food Aid that was shipped to Bolivia.

The StarLink scandal should serve as a cautionary tale against overconfidence in corporate reassurances of food safety and the need for adequate regulations where GMOs are concerned.

more information:
Friends of the Earth United States: www.foe.org/safefood/