For more than a decade, the breakthroughs in genetically engineered crops have been a boon mostly to farmers.
Soybeans resistant to herbicides. Corn that fends off insects. Grains that tolerate drought.
They came with the fear that they would foster indestructible weeds or super-resilient bugs. Despite the isolated realization of the fears, farmers adopted the lab-tailored crops quickly. Today the altered grains dominate fields across the Midwest and virtually every aisle of the grocery store.
Now comes Corn Amylase, a genetically modified crop that offers a direct advantage to ethanol producers. And it creates skeptics among those typically eager to put biotechnology to work.
The new grown-for-fuel corn from the Swiss firm Syngenta Seeds borrows a heat-resistant protein from deep-sea bacteria to produce a kernel easily converted to ethanol without adding expensive enzymes.
It holds the potential to boost farming profits and lower the cost of the gasoline substitute.
“This does a lot of things for us,” said Steve McNinch, general manager of Western Plains Energy, which has been experimenting with it at its ethanol plant in Oakley, Kan.
Because of the alpha-amylase in the corn, the grain’s starch transforms to sugar more easily, the corn mash is more slippery and the cost of making grain into biofuel drops by about 10 percent.
Like other biotechnology before it, Corn Amylase has its detractors.
Federal regulators deciding whether to free the corn seed for full-scale sales were buried in more than 13,000 comments — most from environmental groups that routinely line up against most genetically engineered crops. Also voicing concerns were the National Grain and Feed Association, North American Export Grain Association and Corn Refiners Association.
Food processors worry that the special corn could slip in among conventional grain to turn cheese doodles to dust and foul myriad other processed foods.
The starch in corn makes it a malleable substance that can be heated and squeezed into processed snacks, bind ingredients, make breading stick to chicken before frying, and increase shelf life.
The qualities that make Corn Amylase ethanol-ready — its quick conversion of starch to sugar — could make a messy soup of the thickening agents in pie fillings and scores of other uses.
“The starch is what we sell,” said Jim Bair of the North American Millers’ Association. “Anything that would degrade that product we sell does cause us potential concern.”
For now, he said, his group isn’t opposed to Corn Amylase.
The Food and Drug Administration said the enzyme was safe for human consumption. The Environmental Protection Agency vouches for it.
Its maker, Syngenta, promises that it will be farmed only in “closed-loop” settings to keep it from spoiling commodity grain supplies. It has been grown in controlled conditions in western Kansas and Nebraska since 2002.
Still, regulators reopened their study of the gene-altered corn last month under the weight of so many objections. The Agriculture Department’s animal and plant health inspection service said it wanted to look again at corn-starch processing and whether its widespread planting threatened the value of conventional crops.
The National Corn Growers Association is enthusiastic about biotechnical benefits and said: “There is clearly no question as to the safety. ... The U.S. regulatory system works.”
The smaller and less biotech-friendly American Corn Growers Association is more nervous. Keith Dittrich, its chairman and a Nebraska farmer, said he had grown specialty crops such as blue corn for tortilla chips and had seen its pollen alter crops six miles away.
“You look in the bin and you see a few kernels that are blue,” he said. “That’s fine if it’s just blue corn. But if it’s something you can’t see and that has special properties, then you’ve got a bigger problem.”
The biotech corn Starlink, which was not approved for human consumption, turned up in taco shells in 2000 and triggered a recall that sent corn prices tumbling. A half million bushels of soybeans in a Nebraska grain elevator were destroyed in 2002 after inspectors found traces of an experimental ProdiGene corn designed with a vaccine against traveler’s diarrhea.
Syngenta hopes to clear its final hurdles this year and to see the made-for-fuel corn reach the open market next spring.
To reach Scott Canon, call 816-234-4754.
(c) KansasCity.com
