Syngenta, the Swiss agrochemicals company, was fined US$375,000 by the US Department of Agriculture for inadvertently selling unapproved genetically altered corn seed, the company said on Friday.
The Department of Agriculture also required Syngenta to develop a training program to keep the mix-up in seeds from happening again, the company said.
"We welcome the settlement with the USDA and the government's conclusion that Syngenta's misidentification of Bt 10 corn, while a regrettable mistake, does not pose any risks to consumers, public health or the environment," said Mike Mack, chief operating officer of Syngenta Seeds, a unit of Syngenta in Golden Valley, Minnesota.
Markus Payer, a spokesman for Syngenta in Basel, Switzerland, said the EU had also asked for details on the mix-up in the unapproved seed, Bt 10. On Tuesday the European Commission said it thought that about 1,000 tonnes of the unauthorized corn entered union countries as animal feed, corn flour and corn oil.
The EU, which has strict limits on the use of genetically modified crops, also asked Syngenta how to identify corn grown from the Bt 10 seed, Payer said.
Syngenta reiterated on Friday that the Bt 10 corn was almost biologically identical to Bt 11, another genetically modified corn seed that has been approved in both the US and Europe.
"This has no impact on the safety of the corn," Syngenta said in a statement on Friday.
Environmentalists, however, say that the unapproved corn could promote resistance to antibiotics, a crucial difference between Bt 10 and Bt 11.
Syngenta believes that the problem began with an inadvertent switching of the two types of corn seed by its researchers in the US in the mid-1990s when some Bt 10 seeds were probably mislabeled as Bt 11, Payer said.
After Bt 11, which produces a protein toxic to the European corn borer, won approval in the US and Europe, the company set aside the development of Bt 10.
About 14,000 bags of Bt 10 seeds, or enough to plant almost 15,000 hectares, were sold from 2001 until last year, mainly to farmers in the United States, but also in Canada and Argentina, Payer said. Farmers could have produced an estimated 150,000 tonnes of corn from this area, he added. Assuming export of one-fifth of that, which is the overall ratio of corn exported to the EU, then the amount of Bt 10 corn that ended up in the European countries was probably quite small, Payer said.
Syngenta became aware of the problem late last year while conducting a review of breeding lines in the US, Payer said.
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