Blue Revolution Spawns FrankenFish
Niaz Dorry / Fisherman's Voice Oct01

The pride of the Blue Revolutionaries - genetically engineered salmon - seems to be on trial. "Blue Revolution" is what Elliot Entis calls his prediction "that genetic modifications will usher in a new era of fish farming."

Elliot Entis is the president of Aqua Bounty Farms, a Massachusetts based company with fish farms in the Canadian Maritimes with a request pending before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to market genetically engineered salmon.

The pending approval of his company's application to make genetically modified fish commercially available by the FDA has led to concerns raised by a wide spectrum of the public.

In May 2001, the Center for Food Safety and over sixty individuals and organizations - including five fishermen and eight commercial fishing organizations - filed a petition with five federal agencies to place a moratorium on genetically engineered fish until there is a thorough review of the impact of these fish on human health as well as the environment.

Genetic modification of fish - in this case salmon in Aqua Bounty's labs - involves inserting the gene of an ocean pout into a salmon egg in order to increase the growth rate of the fish. The "instructions" that are encoded in the ocean pout DNA would make the salmon growth hormone work year around making it able to reach market size in a fraction of the time of conventional aquaculture. Currently, there are over thirty-five species of transgenic fish being developed around the world.

Center for Food Safety is concerned that escapement of transgenic fish into the oceans may cause significant impacts to the environment and endangered species. They point to new studies that indicate transgenic fish are more aggressive, eat more food, and attract more mates than wild fish.

But Aqua Bounty says that their fish are domesticated much like cattle today, will be rendered sterile, and won't have a high chance of surviving in the wild.

Anne Kapuscinski, Minnesota Sea Grant research and policy specialist seems to disagree. According to Kapuscinski, "Genetically engineered fish are much riskier than genetically engineered agricultural animals. Animals bred for domestic agriculture have lost many of their natural traits, such as the ability to reproduce or the drive to aggressively defend a territory. Genetically engineered fish, on the other hand, can be very similar to wild fish and may survive, reproduce, and influence the natural environment."

Regardless, Mr. Entis believes that the final judge will be the FDA. The company says it does not intend to market their genetically engineered fish until the FDA has approved it "using a lot of scrutiny."

The petitioners, however, site that the FDA does not have sufficient resources and ability to deal with the broad range of issues that introducing genetically engineered fish could raise. Citing concerns spanning food safety and security, human health concerns, and various environmental issues including the Endangered Species Act, the petitioners are asking for a thorough review of Aqua Bounty's application not just by the FDA. In their petition, they request that the U.S. Department of Interior (DOI), U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC), U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) also be involved. In addition, the petition requests that each federal agency with jurisdiction over an aspect of aquaculture take regulatory action to address the concerns raised by the public.

According to Entis, his technology is only a natural extension of and improvement upon the current aquaculture industry. He believes that their genetically engineered salmon is not an issue for fishermen who don't fish for salmon. Fishermen have trouble with issues that are not part of what his company does, says Mr. Entis, but rather what aquaculture is in general.

But Joe Sinagra, a ground fish fisherman from Gloucester, Massachusetts, says its not just market competition that he's worried about. "I wouldn't be sincere if I didn't admit I had concerns about the market competition. When you introduce a cheap product in the market, even if its quality, overall impact on the ocean and on our health is questionable, the consumer tends to buy the inferior but cheap product." Says Sinagra. "But what's the real price of this genetically engineered fish? I don't think the market price will reflect the real cost to our fishing economies and the health of the oceans that we rely on for our livelihoods."

He's concerned that just as the experience has been with aquaculture pens, the genetically engineered fish will also escape from the pens and compete with the wild stocks of salmon species many of which are listed as endangered as well as other marine animals. Aquaculture escapement is listed as one of the top threats to the wild Atlantic salmon population. In Maine and parts of the North Pacific, hundreds of thousands of farm-raised Atlantic salmon have escaped over the past few years.

In recent years, the proliferation of industrial scale aquaculture has led many fishing communities around the world and here in the U.S. to take a stand against the expansion of this industry. In some parts of the world, the issue has taken violent turns where opponents of the industrial scale shrimp aquaculture have been killed in parts of Asia and Latin America.

Dr. Vandana Shiva, a physicist, author, and now with the Research Institute for Science and Technology in New Delhi, India has worked extensively with communities fighting against the expansion of the shrimp aquaculture industry in that country. In recent years, despite Supreme Court rulings that should bring the expansion to the halt, the industry continues to operate and the protests continue to mount.

"We need to dispel the notion that the environmental movement is a luxury of the rich when in fact it's not. It's the people's survival, especially the poor people's survival" says Dr. Shiva. "An 80-year old elder from one of the tribes who recently died once said 'I want everyone that is eating aquaculture shrimp to know that they are eating our blood',"

In addition to aquaculture, Dr. Shiva has observed the genetic engineering technology and its impact on agriculture for many years. She, too, agrees with Mr. Entis that genetically engineered fish is the natural extension of aquaculture. And, she is concerned that just like the Green Revolution of the agribusiness industry and the subsequent genetic modification of many crops without knowing all the risks to the planet and on our food supply as well as the farmers, that this genetically modified fish technology is being promoted without the necessary precautions.

She believes those responsible for ensuring the safety of our food and our planet have taken a "don't look, don't see, don't find, yet then declare safe" attitude toward genetic engineering.

Currently there are no federal laws specifically governing the regulation of genetically engineered animals grown for human consumption. Some states, such as Maryland, have passed legislation aimed at addressing the current regulatory vacuum. On the federal level, Congressman Dennis Kucinich's (Ohio) efforts to enact federal legislation have not yielded enough votes to win over the U.S. Congress, yet. Canada, the Philippines, and Scotland are amongst the countries that have now started to address the issue of genetically engineered fish.

According to Tracy Letterman, a staff attorney for the Center for Food Safety, with the lack of relevant regulations "the FDA has decided to treat transgenic fish as it would new animal drugs. Given the potential toxicity, allergenicity, and aquaculture diseases posed by the commercialization of transgenic fish, we are asking that the FDA adopt a pre-market regulatory review that does not ignore the potential human health and safety concerns."

Ms. Letterman believes that the right to know what's in ones food is a basic right. Those concerned about genetically engineered fish have requested that at the minimum genetically modified fish should be labeled, complete safety and environmental testing be conducted, and corporate liability be in place to cover any potential harm.

The FDA, in the meanwhile, sees no reason why genetically engineered foods should require labeling or should be deemed unsafe unless the company fails to demonstrate scientifically that the allergenic component of the food is not transferred to the other item or if the nutritional content of the food is changed.

FDA's Jim Maryanski said in a recent interview "if we were to require labeling of all genetically engineered fruits and vegetables, it would not be merely a matter of putting a sticker on a tomato or a banana. Producers would have to segregate the genetically engineered foods from other varieties, whereas normally those are all just lumped into a barrel. And then what happens when you make tomato paste, and that tomato paste is used to make pizzas? Does the label have to follow along through the food processing chain? It would increase the cost of these foods to consumers and would disrupt our complex food distribution system."

In fact, genetically engineered foods have already disrupted the country's food processing chain. On September 18, 2000, Friends of the Earth announced the results of their sampling of taco shells from grocery stores. The Taco Bell Home Originals brand taco shells contained StarLink corn - a genetically modified corn not approved for human consumption. During the ensuing months, various products thought to contain StarLink were recalled.

On September 17, 2001, a class-action suit was filed in Washington County Circuit Court on behalf of 4,600 Taco Bell franchises and owners in the U.S. as well as six other companies alleging that the introduction of StarLink corn has caused "major disruptions of the food supply." Claiming that they lost business due to the use of StarLink in their products, the suit seeks millions of dollars in compensation and punitive damages. According to Friends of the Earth, Taco Bell paid $60 million to their franchises for lost sales.

"Seafood retailers and restaurants risk the same cost of sales that tortilla chips and taco makers suffered due to StarLink corn," Says Larry Bohlen of Friends of the Earth. "Corn prices were compressed 20 cents per bushel last year costing framers $2 billion. Some economists contend that 10 cents was due to StarLink."

What seems to continue to puzzle critics of genetically engineered foods is how they continue to find their way into the food supply without any precautionary measures to ensure their safety and without alerting the public to their presence.

In the Philippines, recent tests showed that genetically modified foods were present in 11 out of 30 products sampled without any knowledge by the consumer. This revelation led to the takeover of one plantation this past August by 800 people consisting of indigenous people, priests, students, and others. The crowd uprooted genetically engineered corn from Monsanto.

Following the protests, Representative Pichay of the Philippines filed a bill intended to put in place a five-year ban on genetically modified foods. Another representative is introducing a bill that would require mandatory labeling.

"The fact that we have found genetically engineered food without even knowing is rising quite an alarm in the cities. There is no anticipation - it's already here. But I remain optimistic that if people are empowered and well informed they'll change things even if at first it seems what you are trying to change is imbedded in the system," says Marissa de Guzman of the University of the Philippines in Manila. "In the Philippines, the problem isn't the absence of laws, but lack of implementation. It won't happen overnight, but it will change."

Over at Aqua Bounty, the company sees the critics not unlike the critics of any other new technology. "Any new technology undergoes a level of scrutiny," states Mr. Entis. "Electricity was around for six years before anyone would use it."

Shawn Cantel of Friends of the Earth thinks comparing introduction of genetically engineered fish to the advent of electricity is a faulty analogy.

"This is a new technology, but not all new technologies are equal. Some have clear and obvious benefits," says Cantel. "Genetic engineering is one with clear and obvious problems. It's like using nuclear power to make electricity."