Fish

This deserves a blog.

AquaBounty is a Canadian company that has developed a GE Salmon. This Salmon is genetically engineered to grow year round (unlikely normal salmon that only grow for some of the year). The result is a bigger fish, quicker.

I'm not going to get into the science of all of this, or the fact that the eggs are being shipped to Panama (as it is not a signatory to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity) to be grown, and then shipped back to the US and Canada to be sold.
Consumers will of course be saved from seeing salmon that looks like it has been stretched and pumped up with a bicycle pump, as they will no doubt be offered the salmon, unlabelled as GE, in neat little shrink-wrapped polystyrene trays.

The bit I'd like to talk about is the company's (AquaBounty) argument for this fish. They claim, quite straight faced, that it is needed to address world hunger. This will no doubt be met with delight by the French who are trying to grow GE vines (which fortunately keep getting ripped out by volunteer reapers, even after public consultation and a fence being erected around the trial). Obviously the starving people in the world will soon need a chilled GE Chardonnay to wash down their GE salmon.

Jokes aside, could they be any more brazen? Salmon as a solution to world hunger? There are so many outrageous things going on here that it's hard to know where to start. How about with salmon. There used to be streams all over the Western US and Canada that were so full of Salmon in season that people scoop them out with buckets, and bears would take one bite of one fish and then move onto another. Many of these rivers and streams have been dammed for various reasons (something about progress and development) and the fish can now no longer return to the spawning grounds as they always have. This is perhaps not such a problem when, with all the money you've made by damming rivers in your own country, you can build fish farms in places like Panama and farm fish there. All good and well except these fish need to be fed something. Mostly they are fed wild fish, but it takes much more than a kilo of wild fish to produce a kilo of farmed salmon. Slowly it starts to look as if AquaBounty may not have the poor and starving peoples interests at heart after all.

We need to look at what we will need to do to enable people to eat salmon without having to make them artificial and raise them in artificial environments completely removed from any type of ecosystem. A good start would be to start questioning companies trying to sell snake oil by promising to feed the world with it.