The U.S. Food and Drug Administration released a report in Washington on Friday, Sept. 3 that is an analysis of genetically modified salmon and it says the fish are safe to eat and "unlikely" to do harm to the environment.
AquaBounty Technologies Inc., from Massachusetts has been working on the product - called AqaAdvantage salmon - for over a decade and spent some $60 million in the process. The FDA's analysis is in advance of three days of public meetings on genetically modified fish beginning Sept. 19.
After those public meetings a decision by the FDA is expected to come sometime in the Fall and should the artificially engineered salmon be approved AquaBounty has said it will be two to three years before they reach the market.
Genetically Modified Salmon Get to Market Faster but Consumer Groups Opposed
The altered salmon have production advantages such as consuming 25% less food and yet reaching market weight in half the time (8 pounds by 18 months). They have a growth hormone gene taken from Chinook and through the modification process that gene is kept active all year which enables the fish to grow for 12 months. In nature salmon produce growth hormones only in hotter seasons and do not grow in winter months.
The company, which claims that their product tastes the same as wild salmon, has addressed fears that the salmon could escape and cross-breed with wild salmon. They will be engineering, they say, only female sterile eggs and selling only to fish producers raising them at inland facilities.
That was good enough for the FDA which said that the engineered fish had an "extremely small" chance of breeding with the salmon population "...due to the presence of multiple, independent forms of physical (mechanical) containment at both facilities."
Groups Opposed to Engineered Salmon Join Together
Opposition to genetically modified salmon has coalesced, or much of it has, as 31 groups have presented a solid front. These organizations include fishing unions, environmental organizations, animal rights and consumer groups. A large concern for this gathering of opposition is a fear of what would happen if the modified salmon were to become part of the wild salmon population.
“The FDA’s decision to go ahead with this approval process is misguided and dangerous and is made worse by its complete lack of data review,” the executive director of the Center for Food Safety, Andrew Kimbrell, said in a recent statement. “FDA has been sitting on this application for 10 years and yet it has chosen not to disclose any data about its decision until just a few days before the public meeting.”
One of the issues these groups have is that the sample size used by the FDA to test the salmon was not, they say, very big. Jaydee Hanson from the Center for Food Safety told New York Times reporter Andrew Pollack that for some of these studies not even a dozen samples were used. “We’re actually pretty amazed at how small their samples were,” Hanson told Pollack.
Consumer-Advocacy Group Looking for Public Meetings Around the Country
The Los Angeles Times quoted Wennonah Hauter, executive director of Food and Water Watch, a consumer-advocacy Group, and she says her group intends to ask for six-month or more extension to the public comment period. Hauter also said they will be asking for hearings to be held all over the country.
"Up to 5% of eggs sold for grow out could be fertile," Hauter told L.A. Times reporter Kim Geiger Friday, Sept. 3. "It seems very likely that there could be fertile salmon that are going to be put into commercial production. The FDA has had a number of deficiencies recently in their food safety oversight. There should be more vetting and more people should be brought into this process."
Meetings on Genetically Modified Salmon and Labeling Modified Food Products
The public meetings scheduled by the FDA for Sept. 19-21, 2010 will be convened by its Veterinary Medicine Advisory Committee (VMAC); to address the meeting groups must apply beforehand. The meetings on the 19th and 20th will be held at 1750 Rockville Pike in Rockville, Maryland.
On the 21st there will be meetings on the labeling of the food should AquaBounty get the green light for production and sale.
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