What If Frankenfish Won't Stay In Their Cages?

A monster wouldn't be a monster if it just stayed in its cage.

That's why environmentalists are joining food safety and public health advocates in speaking out about Frankenfish—the nickname for AquaBounty's "AquAdvantage salmon," which is poised to become the world's first genetically engineering animal approved for human consumption. The FDA is now considering the application and recently took a major step by deeming the product safe for human consumption, based on a scarily insufficient testing.

In the same vein, a coalition of 12 environmental groups are now panning the FDA's plans for a superficial assessment of the environmental risks of the supersized fish, which will grow to double the size of wild salmon to please our hefty appetites. The agency has announced its intention to rely largely on an assessment report prepared by...wait for it...AquaBounty itself. Now there's objective science.  In reality, the minimal assessment sidesteps the weighty issues FDA must address, and a full environmental impact report is needed, which is exactly what the 12 groups told FDA in a letter this week (pdf).

Basically, the company is operating under the assumption that their Frankenfish will be well-behaved and, like good transgenic fish, will stay in their farms where they belong.

History tells us this will not be the case. Inbreeding with escaped farmed salmon is one major reason that Wild Atlantic salmon have been on the endangered species list since 2000.

And while the GE salmon are supposedly sterile, about 5 percent of them could conceivably breed with wild fish, as Sarah Parsons on the Sustainable Food blog reports.

This would be bad news for wild salmon. The GE fish contain genes linked to enhanced hormone production, which allow them to bulk up faster and, like an athlete on steroids, also make them more aggressive. And recent scientific research indicates that if just 60 GE fish escaped into a wild population of 60,000 fish—the wild population would be extinct within 40 generations as their unfit genes spread and their aggressive behavior leads the species to cannibalize itself, according to the coalition's letter. And that's just the effect on wild salmon. Little is known about how the transgenic fish would damage the larger ecosystem and local food chains.

All of this makes it pretty clear to that from an environmental perspective on its own, the FDA should not rush ahead with this approval. It took decades to realize the destruction brought by USDA-approved genetically-modified seeds. Monsanto's Roundup Ready crop line, for example, has long ago left the farm field and developed resistance to herbicides meant to kill them, allowing them to morph into superweeds that farmers are now struggling to battle.

Join Food & Water Watch in its call for FDA to reject approval of GE Salmon. We simply do not know enough to rush forward wreaking havoc on wild ecosystems, all because one company wants to deliver fast-farmed salmon to our dinner plates.

Photo credit: Jlastras via Flickr

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