Government to Approve New Cigarettes

Monday, February 18th 2002, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

WASHINGTON (AP) _ From cereal to corn chips, Americans consume a variety of products made from genetically engineered crops. They can soon add cigarettes to the list _ new smokes are due this spring with tobacco genetically altered to be very low in nicotine.

A new Agriculture Department study confirmed the low levels of nicotine, the chemical that gets smokers hooked, in the biotech tobacco and found that the crop poses little risk to the environment.

Tobacco from crops grown on department-supervised test plots last summer is going into the cigarettes made by Vector Group, parent company of Durham, N.C.-based cigarette maker Vector Tobacco.

The company has asked the Agriculture Department to remove restrictions on where and how the tobacco can be grown, and the agency probably will go along. The tobacco was genetically altered to block the production of nicotine in the plant's roots.

``This thing could be a home run and it could flop. We think the odds are that it is going to be a successful product,'' said Donald Trott, an analyst with the brokerage firm Jefferies and Company Inc.

Vector, which makes Eve-brand cigarettes as well as various generic and discount lines, has not said where it will sell the biotech cigarettes beginning in the spring or what they will be called.

Trott said people who have tried the cigarettes say they light, smoke and taste like ordinary cigarettes.

Government approval would make the tobacco one of the first biotech crops to have a consumer use. Gene-altered soy, the most common biotech crop, can be sprayed with weedkiller without killing it. Other crops resist pests or diseases.

Tobacco industry critics fear low-nicotine cigarettes could encourage more smoking. ``A nicotine-free free cigarette could still deliver very high levels of harmful toxic substances,'' said Matthew Meyers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

Many tobacco farmers and Vector's rival cigarette manufacturers are concerned about the product, too. Growers say the biotech tobacco could get mixed with conventional leaf and jeopardize U.S. exports.

``It is a big issue. It has the potential to change tobacco and tobacco production and the production controls that we have had on tobacco for many years,'' said Larry Wooten, a partner in a tobacco farm and president of the North Carolina Farm Bureau. ``Many of our farmers are not, I would say, aware of the serious implications that this has.''

The government traditionally has controlled tobacco prices and production through the use of quotas, which entitle the owners to market a given amount of leaf each year.

Penalties on nonquota tobacco make it uneconomical to grow in the handful of states that have quotas, such as North Carolina and Kentucky, so Vector is setting up production elsewhere.

The company grew the crop on 5,200 acres in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Mississippi, Louisiana, Iowa and Hawaii. About two-thirds of the crop was grown on several dozen Amish and Mennonite farms in Pennsylvania that traditionally grow the conventional leaf.

Company officials say there is no danger of contaminating conventional tobacco because the biotech version is grown and handled separately from conventional crops.

The tobacco ``always remained in Vector's direct control, all the way through to final production,'' Vector spokeswoman Carrie Bloom said.

The Agriculture Department tests found small amounts of nicotine in the Vector tobacco of about 400 to 1,000 parts per million. Conventional tobacco has 20,000 to 30,000 parts per million.

During last summer's test, the tobacco fields had to be isolated from conventional tobacco and flowers were removed from the plants to prevent them from cross-pollination. The department says there is little chance the biotech crops could become weeds or otherwise damage the environment.

The Vector tobacco is more susceptible to insect damage because of the less of nicotine, which serves as a pesticide in conventional plants, said Jim White, a scientist for the department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

The department will take comments from the tobacco industry and other interested groups before deciding to release the tobacco from regulation.