|
now aware of some of the issues facing the salmon farming industry. Ultimately, Jans' article is a rally cry for patriotism among US consumers. The question is: how many heard the call?
http://www.intrafish.com/article.php?articleID=27819&s
The Ribbon, Early Fall 2002
Research commentary: two studies compare levels of contaminants in farmed versus wild salmon
Sandra Steingraber, Visiting Assistant Professor, BCERF
Easton, M.D.L., Luszniak, D., Von der Geest, E. Preliminary examination of contaminant loadings in farmed salmon, wild salmon and commercial salmon feed. Chemosphere 46 (2002):1053-1074.
Iacobs, M., Ferrario, J., Bryne, C.
Investigation of polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins, dibenzo-p-furans and selected coplanar biphenyls in Scottish farmed Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar).
Chemosphere 47 (2002):183-191.
Includes: "Reports about chemical contaminants in popular seafoods have made many women wonder if farmed fish might well be a safer dietary choice than wild fish. Two new studies from Canada and Scotland indicate that, at least in salmon, they are not. Indeed, the results of these two investigations show that salmon raised in fish farms have significantly higher levels of dioxins, chlorinated pesticides, and PCBs than their free-swimming counterparts. Both studies, conducted independently and published in recent issues of the environmental science journal Chemosphere, trace the source of the contamination back to commercial salmon feed"
Other sections include:
Fish - Health food or conduit of contaminants?
How fish concentrate environmental poisons
The Canadian study - weekly eaters of farmed salmon at risk
The Scottish study - the culprit is fish oils in feed
"Final thoughts: It is easy to convince ourselves that we can somehow opt out of food chain contamination by selecting dietary items, like farmed fish, that are produced under controlled conditions. But all fish, including those confined to watery pens, have to eat. And whenever animals are raised for human consumption, the economic incentive to speed growth by offering a high-fat, high-energy diet means that they are vulnerable to contamination by fat-soluble pollutants. At the same time, economic globalization means that animal feeds can derive from ingredients gathered from all over the world. Thus, a farmed salmon bought in a Canadian fish market may well contain PCBs from herring caught in the Baltic Sea. As noted by the authors of the Scottish study, the farmed fish on your dinner plate may actually be part of many more marine food chains than a wild fish"
http://www.cfe.cornell.edu/bcerf/Newsletter/General/v7i3/rc.salmon.cfm
Minneapolis Star Tribune (Editorial), 28th September 2002
Frankenfish - the trouble with engineered salmon
Last week's pledge by 200 chic chefs and grocers to boycott genetically engineered salmon was chiefly a publicity stunt. These folks may serve or sell a lot of fillets, but nowhere near enough to influence the market for mass-produced salmon -- a market not yet open to transgenic fish. Still, their statement spotlighted yet another biotechnology initiative that has managed, for too long, to evade the intense public debate it deserves. Wild salmon stocks are in trouble nearly everywhere, primarily because of overfishing and environmental degradation. Yet restaurants and supermarkets throughout the developed world have plenty
of salmon steaks and fillets -- cheaper than ever, and never out of season. In the United State alone, consumption has been rising 20 percent per year. This is the blessing of aquaculture, or fish farming, but it's a mixed one. Farmed fillets can't compare with those of wild fish for flavor, texture or even color -- if the growers didn't mix dye into the feed, the flesh would be gray instead of reddish-orange. But salmon is hardly the only food sector where quantity has come to trump quality. Besides, the gourmet-minded can pay a premium for wild fish if they wish. The bigger problems are environmental.
Aquaculture operations are often heavy polluters, fouling waters with concentrations of feed and fish poop. They promote a special kind of overfishing, the indiscriminate, high-volume netting of marine creatures to be ground up for fish chow. And when the farm fish escape their pens, as they often do, they can out-compete their natural counterparts for food and mates.
Transgenic salmon pose an additional and much more dangerous problem. Consider the first fish in line for government approval, developed by Aqua Bounty Farms of Massachusetts. Aqua Bounty's achievement is an Atlantic salmon fitted with a growth gene from Chinook salmon and an "antifreeze" gene from the eel-like, bottom-dwelling ocean pout. By accelerating growth rates, and extending the growing season beyond warm-weather months, the company hopes to produce a fish that bulks up at two to four times the normal pace. If these fish escape, as they surely will, they could transfer their extra genes to natural populations -- a nightmare prospect. Wild Atlantic salmon have declined to the point where they are nearly extinct. Gene transfer could bring the process to quick completion. These concerns are not merely theoretical. The National Research Council, in a recent report that was generally favorable to genetically engineered foods, ranked gene transfer from engineered fish and other animals as an especially serious threat, and one that continues to confound government regulators. Aqua Bounty insists that such fears are overblown, because all of its fish would be sterilized females. But experts doubt the company's ability to guarantee 100 percent sterility.
Without such guarantees, these salmon should be confined to the lab. The salmon cannot be produced commercially without approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is ill-equipped to make the decision on its own but promises to seek advice from agencies that regulate other aspects of genetic engineering. As the National Research Council points out, this illustrates anew the nation's fragmented and incoherent approach to assuring the safety of gene-manipulation technologies and their results,
and to balancing the risks they pose against the benefits they offer.
On that point, it's worth noting that transgenic salmon do not promise the potential benefits associated with transgenic crops -- lowered pesticide use, for example, or drought resistance or enhanced nutritional value. The only gain from putting pout genes into salmon is a faster yield of
cheap, gray fillets, which are already in plentiful supply.
http://www.startribune.com/stories/561/3330722.html
|
