FDA secretly legalizes GM salmon

FDA secretly legalizes GM salmon during holidays while nobody was watching


(NaturalNews) Once the bastion of purity, seafood has now entered the
realm of "manufactured" sustenance, thanks to a couple of U.S.
government bureaucracies.

The Food and Drug Administration has
granted permission to a firm that will allow it to produce GM salmon, a
decision that has been called a genetically modified food "breakthrough"
by breathless journalists who obviously don't understand the gravity of
what has just occurred.

According to Britain's Independent
newspaper, the FDA's decision means the salmon - which reportedly grow
twice as fast as ordinary fish - "could become the first
genetically-modified animal in the world to be declared officially safe
to eat."

In reaching its decision FDA officials said they
couldn't find any valid scientific reasons to ban production of GM
Atlantic salmon, which are engineered using extra genes from two other species of fish - the Pacific Chinook salmon and an eel-like species called the ocean pout.

A 'perfect storm' of deceit regarding GM foods

The
agency's decision clears the last legal hurdle that stood in the way of
GM fish production; reports said the FDA's decision is liable to put
renewed pressure on producers of salmon in Britain and throughout Europe
to follow its lead.

As in the past, government scientists -
inside the U.S., the United Kingdom and elsewhere - have bought off on
the notion of genetically modified foods as a way of increasing the
world's food supply in general; consumers, however, have always taken a
much more cautious approach (as they should).

Misguided supporters of GM fish think the newly created salmon
will make it easier and cheaper to produce on salmon farms, but they
are also buying into the notion that manufacturing GM fish will be
better for the environment because they can also be grown on land-based
farms.

A couple years ago Sir John Beddington, Britain's current
chief scientist, warned there would be a "perfect storm" of a swelling
global population combined with climate change and food shortages,
making it "very hard to see how it would be remotely sensible to justify
not using new technologies such as GM."

Those "warnings" have
become typical of GM proponents - scare tactics aimed at forcing
acceptance of a "science" that enriches the companies managing it at the
expense of the people they are allegedly trying to serve.

Opponents of GM fish
have it right: They argue that introducing such fast-growing salmon
creates unacceptable risks to human health and the environment; they
also know that permitting genetically modified fish to be produced will
likely lead to more GM animal production, which could eventually destroy
entire food chains.

Before issuing its decision, the FDA
had already said the salmon was fit for human consumption, but in a
draft environmental assessment published recently but written in May,
the agency went a step further, "declaring that the production of the GM
fish is unlikely to have any detrimental impact on the wider
environment," the paper said.

Opponents disagree. Dubbing the GM salmon
"Frankenfish," they warn that the modified species could at some point
escape into the wild then interbreed with wild fish, thereby undermining
the genetics of certain species, especially the endangered Atlantic
salmon, known as the "king of fishes" grown on fish farms in the UK.

It's a biotech food world

AquaBounty
Technologies of Maynard, Mass., which has developed the AquAdvantage
salmon, has downplayed any such threat, saying they will be only be
grown as sterile females and kept in secure, land-based containers.

The FDA concurred the risk is negligible, saying such an occurrence would be "extremely remote" at best.

"[The]
FDA has made the preliminary determination it is reasonable to believe
that approval of the AquAdvantage salmon NADA [New Animal Drug
Application] will not have any significant impacts on the quality of the
human environment of the United States (including populations of
endangered Atlantic salmon) when produced and grown under the conditions
of use for the proposed action," said the FDA assessment.

It
sounds like it is just a matter of time before we can add GM fish to the
growing list of modified foods that already exist around the world.


Source:-
http://www.naturalnews.com/038501_GM_salmon_FDA_GMO.html