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Fish Farming

Egad! FDA Has Approved GMO Salmon

By James Donahue

As if we haven’t had enough trouble trying to find safe foods to eat at our grocery stores: the Food and Drug Administration says it is now on the brink of approving genetically modified salmon, produced in factory farms, for human consumption.

The so-called "federal health regulators" say the genetically modified salmon that grows twice as fast as normal is unlikely to harm the environment. How about harming the humans that eat them? Hearings are now being held before these fish are approved for human consumption, possibly in only weeks.

This should be especially troublesome information since salmon, an easily available food sold in fresh meat counters and in convenient-sized cans, has long been a staple in most American homes.

Salmon has been such a popular food in our overpopulated world that we have overfished the seas in search for this popular fish. Researchers have been busy restocking rivers, not only on ocean fronts but even on the Great Lakes, to keep the supply of this fish available.

Also the concept of the industrial fish farm was born. Much of the salmon now packed in those cans is coming from the fish farms, not the open sea. And these fish have been found to be so contaminated with farm chemicals to keep them healthy while existing in an unnatural "sardine packed" caged environment that researchers are warning people not to eat most fish more than once a week.

Even the salmon caught in the open seas are testing high in industrial chemicals like mercury and other dangerous waste products. The warning of limiting the amount of fish we eat has been hanging over our heads for a few years.

The GMO salmon adds a whole new horror to the picture. Genetic modification means that altered genes have been added to the animal to make them grow larger and more quickly than a natural species. Thus there is more profit for the factory fish farmer and more product to flood on the open market. Since the FDA does not require fish processers and canning companies to let us know which foods we buy are GMO and which are not, the chances are very high that canned fish will be GMO factory farm grown. Eat at your own risk.

There is another worrying factor to this latest FDA decision. If these GMO salmon are cleared as expected, it will be the first genetically altered animal approved for food in the world. There is a reason why other world governments are resisting GMO foods. When researchers at places like Monsanto and Dow Chemical tinker with the genes in our food, they seem to like to experiment with stuff that doesn’t belong in the genetic makeup of the plant, or in this case, the animal. If we eat it, who knows what is also secretly being slipped into our food.

For example, this new GMO salmon contains a special growth hormone from the Pacific Chinook salmon that makes it grow larger and faster. The engineers also inserted another gene from an eel-like fish called ocean pout that acts like an "on" switch for the hormone.

Because they contain a lot of fish in a caged environment, salmon farms have become breeding grounds for sea lice. In an effort to control the lice infestation salmon farmers are using a pesticide treatment called emamectin benzoate. This chemical has been found to persist in the tissue of fish and the environment around the fish farm for weeks to months. Emamectin benzoate is a poison that affects nerve cells in animals. So will it do to humans once we begin eating this food?

The salmon factory farms are basically caged areas located in the ocean. Existing farms already operating off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, are said to contain up to 720,000 fish in a single crop, which reach a weight of five kilograms when full grown. One report said the combined biomass of all those fish is equal to 360 Indian bull elephants.

So what happens to all of the fish feces, waste feed, antibiotics and pesticides that drop through the mesh nets to the ocean floor under these feed lots? It might be compared to the big cattle and pig feed lots operating in the United States. Only this waste is contaminating the ocean floors, smothering the marine ecosystem and destroying other natural species living in the area.

And what happens when a storm tears open one of these pens . . . and we all know it is just a matter of time before it happens . . . and these GMO fish escape into the open ocean? The GMO advocates promise that all of the salmon are sterile females and cross breeding with other species of natural salmon will not happen. But can we believe them? What if just one or two of these escaped salmon can still produce fertile eggs? Will we have then introduced a new monster breed of salmon into the world?