THE GUARDIAN, London / Saturday April 22, 2000 / Paul Brown, Environment correspondent
Refusal to accept genetically modified fish as food was a rich man's stance that would be a "terrible mistake, a moral mistake", the president of a US company expecting to market GM salmon said yesterday.
Responding to critics, Elliot Entis cited a United Nations estimate that a sevenfold increase in the production of seafood was needed in the next 25-30 years if the present per capita consumption of fish was to be maintained for a growing world population.
Transgenic fish, he argued in an interview with the Guardian, were likely to be one of the few ways of providing protein for millions of people at a reasonable price.
Mr Entis, president and chief executive of Aqua Bounty Farms in Boston, believes that his group could soon get regulatory approval from the US food and drug agency to produce transgenic salmon for the retail market, with the first fish appearing on supermarket shelves in the US by 2002.
Mr Entis has run into serious resistance in Europe, not only from environmental groups but also from salmon farmers, and he acknowledged that consumers in Britain were "not yet ready" for his product.
But, he argued, objecting to GM foods was "a rich white man's argument": activists in Europe had this luxury because people in their region had enough to eat.
Outside the US, Mr Entis is to target his fish particularly at Asia; China is avidly interested in using fish modification to feed its population of more than 1bn.
Criticising some campaigners and some British media, the Guardian included, Mr Entis said: "I feel very deeply that all this focus on the disadvantages merely ignores and puts to one side any benefits.
"There are many benefits to this technology. Bio-technology can lead to greater productivity, far less use of noxious chemicals we all complain about, and far better use of land and water.
"I think that to ignore or put in the trash can this kind of technology is a terrible mistake, it's a moral mistake."
If civilisation was to survive with everyone having enough to eat, he argued, exploitation of bio-technology was essential. But, he added: "I am not stuffing it down people's throats" - capitalism weeded out products based on whether they met a need.
He was critical of some of the assertions made about transgenic salmon. Fish with four to six times normal growth rates did not grow into salmon 12ft long weighing 200lb - they grew to the same size as wild fish, but in a shorter time.
In natural conditions salmon grew to 60 to 70 grammes (less than three ounces) in 15 months. With a growth gene inserted, this weight was achieved in three or four months.
After that, the growth rate began to slow, and at the end of 14-18 months the genetically modified salmon were between one and three kilogrammes (2.2 and 6.6 lbs).
Once the fish reached sexual maturity the growth rate slowed to normal rates, he said. "Quite why this is, we do not fully understand; but we are on the fourth generation of these fish, and we have bred thousands of them and the results are the same."
He said that the largest fish his firm had ever produced, called "Bertha", weighed in at 16 kilos (35 lbs), well below the record sizes of wild Atlantic salmon.
He thought most concerns regarding the technology centred on potential mixing and mating with wild species, rather than on food safety. He predicted that permission for transgenic salmon might initially be given for breeding them on shore in tanks, rather than in sea pens.
Critics argue that sea-based captive breeding could see transgenic salmon escaping and interbreeding with wild species.
Mr Entis said that all his salmon were bred to be sterile and, although no system could be perfect, in the thousands of tests, not one of his fish had been found to be fertile.
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