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Frankenfish attack

How comfortable are you sitting down to dine on artificial, lab-created salmon?

Think quickly, because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering a biotech company’s plan for a made-in-Canada GE fish to land on a dinner plate near you.

With Atlantic salmon facing decline, Waltham, Massachusetts-based AquaBounty Technologies says it’s produced an engineered fish that tastes exactly like salmon, with the same colour, odour and texture.

The only difference is that AquAdvantage Atlantic salmon contain a growth hormone gene from chinook salmon to accelerate their early development and a DNA fragment from the eel-like ocean pout to help activate the growth hormone.

Still hungry?

“Most of our major fisheries are overfished, the world population is growing, demand for seafood is growing and we need some alternatives,” says John Buchanan, AquaBounty’s director of research. He says the breed they’re working on will mature in two years, half the time conventional fish take to reach market size.

Moreover, he tells me, the fish will not only be as healthy to eat as regular salmon, they’ll be more environmentally friendly. Some fish farms have trouble with disease and escape, he says, but the AquaBounty salmon will be exclusively female, almost uniformly sterile and raised in self-contained facilities inland.

Still, not everyone’s convinced we can predict either the eco consequences or the health effects of unleashing DNA-manipulated fish on the planet. When the FDA held hearings last month to discuss AquaBounty’s proposal, demonstrators, including reps from Ben & Jerry’s, protested in Washington, DC, and outside the company’s facility in Bay Fortune, PEI.

It’s Canadian tech, after all. Back in 1989, molecular biologists at Memorial University in St. John’s and the University of Toronto hatched a plan to develop salmon that grow quickly and tolerate extremely cold water. A U.S. financier read about the research, reeled in the Memorial scientist, and AquaBounty was born.

The firm has also approached Canadian regulators for approval. The FDA proposal calls for eggs to be produced in PEI and then hatched and the salmon reared and processed in Panama. But Buchanan tells me the company actually wants to sell its eggs to fish farms close to consumer markets.

“As a genetics company we’d sell the eggs to a grower who has an agreement with the FDA for certain standards of compliance,” Buchanan says. “I’m assuming that good husbandry practices would be employed by the farmer.”

Lucy Sharratt, coordinator of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, doesn’t buy the claims.

“There’s never been any long-term studies into the health impacts of genetically engineered foods. Essentially by releasing genetically engineered foods onto the market, one huge experiment is being conducted.”

Sharratt adds that genetic engineering explicitly supports factory farming and can introduce new environmental and health risks to an already troubled industrial food production system.

Moreover, she’s concerned about the company’s plan to sell its eggs to fish farms. How much control would AquaBounty actually have over its enviro commitments, Sharratt asks.

“They’re avoiding the biggest environmental risk question by saying they would produce only in Panama, when their plans are actually something else entirely,” Sharratt says.

At the Consumers Union in New York, senior scientist Michael Hansen says he’s not satisfied by the documentation supplied to the FDA.

“They have too-small sample sizes. Looking at six fish, on allergenicity, for example, and making determinations – that’s not correct.”

While the FDA oversees the entire regulatory process in the U.S., multiple agencies handle oversight north of the border. Health Canada regulates GMO products as “novel foods” and addresses health and safety, while the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, a branch of Agriculture Canada, has traditionally handled many eco issues. With no regulations in place to handle GMO animals, eco oversight has been handed over to Environment Canada.

For confidentiality reasons, Health Canada, says spokesperson David Thomas, cannot confirm whether or not AquaBounty has filed a submission or any other information related to a submission.

If approved, GMO fish would likely take a few years to show up in North America’s food supply. Currently, AquAdvantage salmon are in a head-to-head race with a genetically engineered pig being developed at the University of Guelph for becoming the first GMO animal to enter the food system anywhere in the world.

But there’s been trouble on that front. In 2002 11 experimental GMO piglets at the U of Guelph were mistakenly sent to a rendering plant and turned into animal feed instead of being destroyed, and two years later this happened again with unapproved GMO pharma-pigs from Quebec.

“It’s predictable that one or more containment measures can and will fail at one point,” Sharratt says. “Atlantic salmon are a threatened species. The environmental risk is too great.”

news@nowtoronto.com

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