@morethanorganic

Giant Salmon, Ideals, Practicalities

November 2010

Rarely do we get into a debate about what is needed most at this point in time. We may know from our own lives, the difference between needing and wanting, but how does that translate to a World level view of how best to develop food systems? Trying to make a living from small scale farming has a way of cutting through idealism, to reveal common sense solutions that meet needs in a practical simpler manner.

Talking with scientists about the imminent FDA approval of genetically modified salmon, there is little interest in the benefits of Aqua Bounty's technology, apart from the claimed decrease in time to market, and resulting financial gain for the corporation and it's employees. There is nothing out of the ordinary about Aqua Bounty, wanting to profit from their technology, but where is the need for the technology? The International Federation of Salmon Farmers, have distanced themselves from genetic modification, preferring to stay with traditional breeding techniques, and any other salmon farmers that are interested in supplying the US market with gmo salmon, will have to invest in inland fisheries, aside from their usual sea enclosures. So where is Aqua Bounty's market for their gmo technology? With FDA approval, the door opens to present this technology in a favourable light to the World. Once the technology is being implemented in developing countries, where are the risk assesments or safety protocol that will protect our eco systems from contamination?

Aqua Bounty's gmo Atlantic salmon, grow twice as fast and up to three times larger than farmed Atlantic salmon, which are already much larger than wild Atlantic salmon. The gene that Aqua Bounty have engineered, takes a growth hormone gene from Chinook salmon, and keeps that hormone permanently turned on, using genetic information from a third fish - an Ocean Pout. There is no doubt that salmon farmers using conventional breeding techniques have managed to evolve fish that are quite different from wild salmon, in both their physical characteristics and behaviour, but then to ask these farmed salmon to grow twice as fast again, based on the insertion of a single engineered gene - where is the need?

The health of these gmo fish has implications for their own welfare and also the quality of food they will provide people. Both these issues are high on the public radar in developed countries. Yet, many ideas about health and food quality, are only concerned with nutrients and seperate physical properties. This view has benefits, but doesn't have any authority to be considered definitive or exhaustive, and in many ways, is limiting. By focussing only on the seperate physical properties of the fish, we don't appreciate the whole fish. These gmo salmon are dependent on many causes and conditions, that result in their quality as a food source for people. So quality is connected with what effects the fish - the water in which it swims, it's health, it's food, it's captive environment - everything is shaping what in this case will result very quickly in a mature farmed salmon.

Farmers who appreciate this wider idea of quality, have some awareness of the causes and conditions that result in the foods they produce. For example, we can't grow quality corn by focussing only on the plant, as it's development depends on soil, sunlight, water, air and so on. This is the message of organic farming - we're focussing on managing conditions that result in quality food, so we're interested in whole systems. This is a view that can't be seperated from the need for long term care of natural systems, because we depend on them. Our human health depends on their health - the two are not seperate. So organic farming is based on maintaining and even improving the long term health of natural systems to produce quality food. This long term view doesn't fit snugly into the industrialised world of short term material gain, yet it's practicality is based on the deeper need of marrying human health with that of natural systems.

It makes practical and economic sense to first make the most of what already exists around us. In bigger cities in the UK, there are now projects underway that are collecting garden apples from people who have no need for them. These apples are pressed into juices and made into products, to be sold as part of community schemes. In the same way, we could look at other foods we already have and decide how to use them more efficiently, before we spend tens of millions of dollars and ten years of research, working out how to make a farmed salmon grow twice as fast. In this ideal gmo salmon world, all our food grows twice as fast - so we can eat twice as much of it, and it can all be produced by pushing a few buttons.