10/25/00
Our Best Customer Gets Starlinked: Japan
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(25 October - Cropchoice Opinion) -- American agriculture keeps giving
its customers a rough ride on GMOs. Just a couple of weeks ago, an
emergency squad of the top brass of American grain exports were in Tokyo
to reassure the Japanese that we wouldn't export the Starlink problem.
Well, guess what?
But it has been confirmed that we haven't just Starlinked ourselves (and,
probably, Mexico), we've Starlinked Japan too. For America's customers,
Starlink is proof that the US isn't up to the task of giving its customers
what they ask for. The message America is sending to the world is, as one
Kenyan recently put it, "Just shut up and eat your GM soup".
Yesterday the Japanese Consumers Union identified illegal Starlink in
snack foods and animal feed, while Reuters reported that an entire 55,000
ton corn shipment to Japan may have been rejected because it contained the
unapproved corn.
American elevators have started going public with the stories of
processors rejecting Starlink, forcing the elevators to sell cheap to
ethanol and animal feed makers. This offended poultry giant Tyson, which
doesn't want Starlink concerns to spill over to chicken buying consumers.
So, Tyson promptly declared that it wasn't going to buy any more Starlink,
not even for chicken feed.
Consumer groups in Europe, and probably Canada, Korea, Mexico, Hong Kong,
and a number of other countries and sending dozens of boxes of corn
flakes, candy bars, tortilla chips, and anything else suspected to contain
American corn to the genetic testers. At up to $400 a pop, it's a great
time to be in business if you run a GMO testing laboratory.
When some of these tests results come back positive for Starlink, there
will be more calls to reject American grain, and more suspicion about GMOs
in general and American exports in particular. Already, a batallion of
small scale tortilla makers in Mexico has banded together with
anti-American slogans in the "GMO-Free Tortilla Makers Network". In their
minds, there's an aspect of the Starlink story that's about protecting
Mexican heritage from Yankee imperialism.
In a few years business school students will study the Starlink disaster
as an example of the self-inflicted wounding of an export industry.
Through it all Aventis, Starlink's maker, is buying what Starlink it can
at a modest premium and trying to match tainted elevators and bins with
willing buyers. Of course, don't chalk it up to kind hearts - the
government is angry at how ineffective Starlink has made its regulations
look, and Aventis is scared stiff over the massive liability potential.
Lawyers are hot on the Starlink case, especially when they hear that many
farmers say they were never told it needed to be segregated. At a cost of
over $100 million and counting (before any lawsuits), it could eventually
be enough to bring down Aventis' entire US crop science operation.
Some observers have been surpirsed at the play the Starlink story has in
the media and have only recently allowed that the fiasco has some staying
power. We think the story may have more than staying power - after a
month it only shows signs of getting bigger.
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