When the New York Times reported in June of 2010 that the US Food and Drug Administration was seriously considering approving a genetically modified Atlantic salmon for American consumption the cries from environmentalists and food reformers were predictably almost audible on the streets. The AquAdvantage? Salmon uses a genetic on-switch from a fish called an ocean pout (a very different animal) in combination with a growth gene from a Chinook salmon to achieve double the growth rate of the unmodified creature. The animals creator AquaBounty Technologies of Waltham MA asserts that the fish will be sterile and grown in out-of-ocean bio-secure containment structures. Nevertheless the emotional worry of genetic contamination of wild fish the public preoccupation with health risks a modified salmon could pose and just the overall ick-factor consumers seem to have about GMO food were all on display across the foodie and environmental blogosphere a few days after the Times article ran.
But curiously perhaps the loudest groan that I heard in response to the AquaBounty successes came from salmon farmers. What I have been noticing over the years Thierry Chopin an aquaculture researcher based in New Brunswick Canada wrote me is that the aquaculture industry is not jumping to embrace what AquaBounty has been proposing. For years salmon farmers have been waging a public relations war trying to gain legitimacy as an industry that could be both profitable and produce more food for a hungry world. When a paper published in the journal Nature in 2000 revealed that it took more than three pounds of wild forage fish to grow a single pound of farmed salmon the salmon industry responded through selective breeding increased use of soy and other agricultural products and more efficient feeding practices to lower the wild fish use of farmed salmon to the point where some farms claim to have achieved a fish in-fish out ratio of close to 1 pound of wild fish for 1 pound of farmed salmon. When diseases like infectious Salmon Anemia and parasites like sea lice began to run rampant on salmon farms around the world some regions like the Bay of Fundy in Canada instituted better fallowing and crop rotation practices and appear to have had some success in breaking disease and parasite cycles. But in spite of these improvements a single mention of transgenic salmon in a major media outlet is enough to spoil whatever gains the industry has made in public perception. Indeed many lay-people I talk with have the impression that transgenic salmon are already a regular part of the farmed salmon market this despite the fact that there are still no transgenic salmon sold in the United States or anywhere else that Ive encountered.
Dont get me wrong. I sincerely do not believe that the salmon industry has solved its environmental problems. But I do think that it suffers an unfair association with the AquaBounty project and that genetic modification distracts from what investment and research really needs to address. The two biggest problems with farming salmon are:
1) Salmon are grown in sea cages often anchored amidst wild salmon migration routes. This can cause the fouling of waters with wastes and the transmission of diseases and parasites to already seriously threatened and endangered stocks of wild salmon. Selectively bred fish regularly escape and some suggest they may interfere with the lifecycles of wild fish. Even worse?? entirely different species of salmon are often raised in non-native environments. Atlantic salmon are regularly farmed in the Pacific and often escape.
2) Farmed salmon consume a huge amount of wild forage fish. Even though feed efficiency on a per fish basis has improved dramatically?? salmon farming overall has grown so much that the per-fish efficiency has been all but erased by a much larger overall presence of salmon farming in the world. Atlantic salmon?? once limited to the northern latitudes of the northern hemisphere?? are now farmed on every single continent save Antarctica. It??s possible farmed salmon"ees may h