The debate continues.....GM salmon or not? The US authorities are said to be on the cusp of deciding, possibly this coming week, whether to allow GM salmon. It looks like the US FDA may not consider all the things it ought to in deciding whether to grant the OK for GM salmon.
IPS reports:
"It would be the first GM animal approved for human consumption, and there are fears that the review process is overlooking key ripple effects of approving the fish.
These ripple effects are both positive, such as public health benefits, and negative, such as environmental degradation, say researchers.
The debate over the salmon, which would be raised on fish farms and which contains inserted genes from two other species of fish that allow it to grow faster and require less feed than conventional salmon, has focused on whether the fish would pose a hazard to human health or, were it to escape into oceans or rivers, to wild salmon populations.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is charged with evaluating these risks, but critics say the agency is not prepared and does not have a broad enough mandate to fully examine all the implications of allowing this fish on grocery shelves.
And those implications – both positive and negative – could be vast."
Meanwhile, as The Age reports, what sorts of farms grow our food, is the subject of concern by Joew Salatin:
"Joel Salatin, hailed by Time magazine for his prize-winning, pioneering work as a sustainable farmer, is in Sydney to convince farmers that small-scale food producers can be financially successful and rejuvenate the environment.
''That's not happening for many farmers,'' Salatin says. ''Many farmers are going out of business and there's a lot of land degradation. The fact is that industrial agriculture has destroyed a lot of land and destroyed a lot of the food and a lot of the health of people around the world.''
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