Updated update; GM Salmon approved as food in USA

It was only last week that Canadian ecological agencies were in court challenging Canadian government approval for a company which has created genetically modified salmon at its operation on Prince Edward Island.

The groups say the government ignored its own guidelines in approving the process, and that it went beyond the company’s own request.

Now, in a surprise move late last week that the US  Food and Drug Administration announced it had approved the “AquaAdvantage” salmon from AquaBounty Technologies for marketing to the public

This is the world’s first food animal approved for human consumption.

Lucy Sharrat is the Coordinator, Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN) based in Ottawa. It is one of the groups which has been involved in challenging the Canadian approval for the company to proceed with development of GM salmon.

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The FDA approval of the so-called AquaAdvantage salmoncomes as a complete surprise to many, and Mark Butler of Ecology Action Centre notes, gives if not necessarily a legal precedent, does nonetheless give GM food products  a “beachhead” from which to advocate for wider approval for this and all future GM food products.

The FDA approval notice (here)

The American-based company set up a development facility on Canada’s east coast province of Prince Edward Island to create GM salmon eggs in an interior facility. They would then be shipped to a location in Panama to be raised to market size.

Lucy Sharrat points out that in spite of assurances of safeguards, there have been many other cases of GM products slipping through the safeguards and contaminating elsewhere. She feels that the same would undoubtedly happen at some point with the GM  :”AquaAdvantage” salmon.

She estimates in may take a little more than a year before the fish will be marketed to US consumers but notes that the Canadian and US markets are intimately linked and the salmon could possibly end up in Canadian stores.

In a study in 2013, the University of Guelph (Ontario) discovered that many fish in supermarkets were not actually what was being advertised.

Lucy Sharrat says this shows the difficulty of knowing  in the future whether one could be buying a wild salmon, or a GM salmon, and that it would aslo be difficult to ensure that GM salmon were not being sold in Canada prior to any potential Health Canada approval.

In a related note, Memorial University sent out a press release noting that the basics of the AquaBounty Technologies commercial product were developed by two of its professors. Dr. Garth Fletcher, head, Department of Ocean Sciences, along with Dr. Choy Hew, a former Department of Biochemistry researcher. While conducting research at the Newfoundland university they were funded in their efforts by the  Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).  They patented the technology and became two of the original founders of Aquabounty Technologies of Massachusetts.

Canadian food marketing expert Sylvain Charlebois of the University of Guelph, notes that several major US supermarkets, such as Whole Foods, Trader Joes’, Aldi, Target and Kroger, have begun boycotting the product. Sharratt hopes that if Canadian government action is lacking on GM labelling, that supermarket chains in Canada will also boycott such products.