Saving Seafood

Congressional GMO Labelling Fight Set For January

December 17, 2015 — Lawmakers are pledging to re-double efforts to pass legislation early next year to block state GMO labeling laws and set national disclosure standards.

The industry wanted to get a bill attached to the must-pass fiscal 2016 spending agreement that congressional leaders reached on Tuesday, but talks stalled and Senate Democrats stopped even a temporary preemption measure from being included.

“The clock’s ticking. We’ll be back in session in January and that’s got to be at the front,” said House Agriculture Chairman Mike Conaway, R-Kansas. “We’ve got it fixed in the House. We’ve just to get the Senate to move on it.”

Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, the top Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, has also pledged to make the issue a top priority in January. She had been leading negotiations on the legislation this fall and had said in October that she wanted a bill passed by the end of the year.

An industry lobbyist who didn’t want to be quoted by name said negotiations would “begin in earnest” right after the first of the year on broad legislation.

A Vermont labeling laws is set to take effect in July, and the failure of the federal preemption measure could embolden labeling proponents who are gearing up to push next year for labeling laws in New York state and Connecticut, said Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food and Water Watch, which supports the state labeling efforts.

Read the full story at KTIC

Are You Eating Frankenfish?

December 15, 2015 — This month, Congress may decide whether consumers are smart enough to be trusted with their own food choices. Some lawmakers are trying to insert language into must-pass spending legislation that would block states from giving consumers the right to know whether their food contains genetically modified ingredients.

They must be stopped.

Nine out of 10 Americans want G.M.O. disclosure on food packages, according to a 2013 New York Times poll, just like consumers in 64 other nations. But powerful members of the agriculture and appropriations committees, along with their allies in agribusiness corporations like Monsanto, want to keep consumers in the dark. That’s why opponents of this effort have called it the DARK Act — or the Deny Americans the Right to Know Act.

As a chef, I’m proud of the food I serve. The idea that I would try to hide what’s in my food from my customers offends everything I believe in. It’s also really bad for business.

Why, then, have companies like Kellogg and groups like the Grocery Manufacturers Association spent millions in recent years to lobby against transparency? They say, in effect: “Trust us, folks. We looked into it. G.M.O. ingredients are safe.” But what they’re missing is that consumers want to make their own judgments. Consumers are saying: “Trust me. Let me do my own homework and make my own choices.”

Read the full opinion piece at the New York Times

Finding Refuge for Salmon, Cold Water Preferred

December 11, 2015 — PORTLAND, Ore. — When Lewis and Clark first encountered the Columbia River in 1805, they wrote about nearby streams so thick with salmon that you could all but walk across on their backs.

Last summer, those streams looked very different. As a torrid heat wave settled over the Pacific Northwest, the salmon heading up the Columbia River from the ocean in their ancient reproduction ritual started dying en masse, cooked in place by freakishly hot water that killed them or made them vulnerable to predators. Sockeye died by the hundreds of thousands.

“It was a peek at the future,” said Jim Martin, a former chief of fisheries for Oregon, who now works on conservation issues for a fishing tackle company, Pure Fishing. “This is exactly what is predicted by climate-change models.”

Other salmon experts, though, said the future was not that clear. Even as the sockeye here were dying, they said, pink salmon were exploding in number, especially in the Puget Sound area around Seattle. Alaska, which actually supplies most of the wild-caught salmon eaten in Portland, Seattle and other coastal cities that have their identities tied to fish, had its own good-news story this year, with a near-record harvest.

Read the full story at the New York Times

GMO fish and the strangeness of American salmon

December 2, 2015 — Sometime in the next few years, an entirely new fish will appear on American plates. After several decades of biotech research and a final upstream push past the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last month, the AquaBounty AquAdvantage salmon, a genetically engineered species of fish, will go into commercial production. While modified plants like corn and soy abound in the American diet, this will mark the first time in history that an engineered animal has been approved for human consumption. The new fish’s genetic code is comprised of components from three fish: base DNA from an Atlantic salmon; a growth gene from a Pacific Chinook salmon; and a promoter, a kind of “on” switch for genes, from a knobby-headed eel-shaped creature called an ocean pout.

The salmon’s pathway to the market will involve a similarly complex formulation. The first phase of AquAdvantage production will take place in Canada, on Prince Edward Island. There, the all-female eggs will be rendered sterile through a pressure treatment. They will then be flown to Panama, where they’ll be hatched, raised to harvestable size, slaughtered, and imported into the U.S. as the familiar orange-hued fillets that Americans have come to prefer above all other types of fish. Though AquaBounty hopes that the costs of this circuitous route to market could be offset by the savings incurred from the fish’s rapid growth (the company claims that AquAdvantage reaches maturity in about half the time as unmodified fish), the company is hoping to eventually gain permission to farm the fish here at home. “In the longer run,” AquaBounty’s co-founder, Elliot Entis, wrote me in an e-mail, “the real payoff will be when inland recirculating facilities are built in the U.S.”

Read the full story at The New Yorker

Salmon breakthrough was driven by chance

November 25, 2015 — It was the early 1980s, and a group of Canadian fish farmers was hoping to find a way for salmon to thrive in the region’s frigid waters. So scientists in Newfoundland began experimenting with how to inject them with antifreeze proteins from an eel­-like creature known as ocean pout.

Instead, they found a way to make the fish grow more quickly.

That work, more than 30 years ago, led to the controversial breakthroughs that allowed AquaBounty Technologies, a biotechnology company in Maynard, to produce a rapidly growing salmon, which the Food and Drug Administration last week declared the first genetically altered animal fit for consumption.

“We thought if we can enhance the growth rate, that’s good for the industry, which can get fish to market faster,” said Garth Fletcher, a researcher at Memorial University in Newfoundland, who did the initial experiments that led to the creation of salmon that can grow twice as fast as those in the wild. Fletcher’s technique of inserting growth hormone from Chinook salmon and a “promoter gene” from ocean pout is now considered antiquated technology. But scientists say its commercial application heralds a new era of genetic engineering.  

Federal regulators on Thursday approved a Massachusetts biotechnology company’s bid to modify salmon for human consumption.

“We thought if we can enhance the growth rate, that’s good for the industry, which can get fish to market faster,” said Garth Fletcher, a researcher at Memorial University in Newfoundland, who did the initial experiments that led to the creation of salmon that can grow twice as fast as those in the wild.

Fletcher’s technique of inserting growth hormone from Chinook salmon and a “promoter gene” from ocean pout is now considered antiquated technology. But scientists say its commercial application heralds a new era of genetic engineering.

New techniques have allowed scientists to more precisely alter animal genomes by editing DNA to include or exclude beneficial or harmful traits. Researchers are now experimenting with modifying the genes of chickens so they don’t transfer avian flu, for example. They also want to develop pigs and cattle that are resistant to foot and mouth disease, and goats that produce a higher level of a microbial protein that may help treat diarrhea in people.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Blumenthal wants GMO salmon labeled

November 24, 2015 — HARTFORD — U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal joined consumer advocates in the Capitol on Monday to criticize last week’s approval of genetically modified salmon and to advocate for mandatory labeling changes.

“The genetically engineered salmon is bigger, it can be grown faster,” Blumenthal said, stressing the Food and Drug Administration will require no special labeling for the engineered fish at grocery stores and fish markets, even though it will contain the genetic material of a bottom-feeder fish called the ocean pout to speed its growth.

“I believe strongly that the consumers have a right to know,” Blumenthal, D-Conn., said during a morning news conference.

The FDA recently said its scientists “rigorously evaluated extensive data” from fish grower AquaBounty Technologies, along with peer-reviewed data.

“The data demonstrated that the inserted genes remained stable over several generations of fish, that food from the GE salmon is safe to eat by humans and animals, that the genetic engineering is safe for the fish, and the salmon meets the sponsor’s claim about faster growth,” the agency said.

Read the full story at Connecticut Post

FDA OK’s genetically modified salmon

November 20, 2015 — For the first time, Americans will be able to dine on a genetically altered animal, after federal regulators on Thursday approved a Massachusetts biotechnology company’s bid to modify salmon for human consumption.

After years of testing the company’s modified fish, regulators said there are no “biologically relevant differences” between the so-called AquAdvantage salmon and other farm-raised Atlantic salmon. Still, for the time being the FDA has barred the fish from being cultivated in the United States and has issued strict regulations to prevent the modified salmon from breeding with those in the wild.

The decision was a big win for AquaBounty, which began seeking approval in the 1990s for its technique of inserting growth hormone genes from Chinook salmon and an eel-like creature called ocean pout into the DNA of Atlantic salmon. The faster the fish grow, the more the company can produce and sell, potentially reducing overfishing of the oceans and developing a new source of food for a growing global population.

Company officials said the federal approval would create a new industry in the United States, which they say imports 95 percent of its Atlantic salmon. But it was unclear how long it might take before the fish appear in supermarkets.

“AquAdvantage salmon is a game-changer that brings healthy and nutritious food to consumers in an environmentally responsible manner, without damaging the ocean and other marine habitats,” Ronald L. Stotish, the chief executive of AquaBounty, said in a statement.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Efforts underway to ensure ‘Alaskan’ seafood is authentic

November 11, 2015 — As a result of international tracking difficulties, seafood marketed as “Alaskan” is often anything but, sparking legislative calls to make the Alaska label a privilege, not a right.

Wild-caught Alaska seafood is marketed as sustainable and healthy for local economies, strong selling points for the modern U.S. consumer. The labels aren’t always accurate, however, as pirate fishing and outright fraud often put foreign or untracked seafood under the Alaska banner.

International agreements and national legislation aim to impose more stringent tracking requirements for seafood landings, which are often the root of mislabeled fish. Other legislation simply pushes for marketing changes to make sure the label “Alaska” means what it says.

Marketing and international traceability issues haunt Alaska pollock, crab, and salmon, the largest and most valuable of Alaska’s federal and state fisheries.

In Congress, Rep. Don Young and Rep. Jaime Beutler, R-Wash., introduced legislation on Oct. 22 to amend the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to change the term “Alaska pollock” to “pollock.”

According to a GMA Research consumer report, up to 40 percent of what is currently sold as “Alaska pollock” is in fact from Russia waters, which do not have the same controls and management frameworks as U.S. North Pacific fisheries governed by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, particularly concerning marine habitat protections and preventing overfishing.

Pollock is the largest fishery in the U.S., producing 2.9 billions pounds and accounting for 11 percent of U.S. seafood intake. In the North Pacific management region, pollock accounted for $406 million worth of landings.

Read the full story at Alaska Journal of Commerce

 

Big Trouble Looms For California Salmon — And For Fishermen

November 6, 2015 — The West Coast’s historic drought has strained many Californians – from farmers who’ve watched their lands dry up, to rural residents forced to drink and cook with bottled water. Now, thanks to a blazing hot summer and unusually warm water, things are looking pretty bad for salmon, too – and for the fishermen whose livelihoods depend on them.

Preliminary counts of juvenile winter-run Chinook are at extreme low levels. These are salmon that are born during the summer in California’s Sacramento River and begin to swim downstream in the fall.

Unusually warm water in recent months has caused high mortality for the young salmon, which are very temperature sensitive in their early life stages. Most years, about 25 percent of the eggs laid and fertilized by spawning winter-run fish survive. This summer and fall, the survival rate may be as low as 5 percent, according to Jim Smith, project leader with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Red Bluff office.

“That’s not good,” Smith tells The Salt.

Worse, it’s the second year in a row this has happened. Most Chinook salmon live on a three-year life cycle, which means one more year like the last two could essentially wipe out the winter run. To protect them, fishing for Chinook in the ocean may be restricted in the years ahead, when winter-run fish born in 2014 and 2015 have become big enough to bite a baited hook. The hope is that the few young fish that survived the recent warm-water die-offs will make it through adulthood and eventually return to the river to spawn.

Read the full story at New York Now

 

In the Dry West, Waiting for Congress

November 6, 2015 — KLAMATH FALLS, Ore. — Drought in the West is an ugly thing. Rivers trickle away to nothing, fires rage, crops fail, ranchers go broke, tribal people watch fish die. As Westerners fight over the little water left, tempers crack, lawsuits fly and bitterness coats whole communities like fine dust.

As the climate warms, the West gets meaner.

The Klamath River begins in southern Oregon and meets the Pacific Ocean among the redwoods in Northern California, draining nearly 16,000 square miles. Until recently, who got water and how much had been deeply contentious issues. In particular, the irrigators and the Indian tribes were angry at one another, and the users in the river’s upper basin were angry with users in the lower basin.

But in recent years, something changed. Hostility gave way to compromise. Just about everybody who wants some of that precious river flow has made nice, given and taken, sat down and compromised.

Three major agreements have been wrapped up in Senate Bill 133, introduced by Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, and several colleagues. The bill is supported by tribes that want to protect the fish; ranchers who want to feed their cattle; farmers who grow alfalfa and potatoes; fly fishermen and duck hunters; ecologists; a power company; and many local politicians of various ideological stripes.