Modified menagerie for US dinner tables

WASHINGTON - If consumers were dismayed by the news that hundreds of giant genetically engineered salmon are under production in Canada, they will be even more alarmed by the arrival of "enviro-pig," a beast engineered to produce low-phosphorus faeces that are deemed less harmful to the environment.

A special report in the New York Times claimed that the pig is one of a whole menagerie of animals - cows, goats and sheep - being modified in America. Most are being altered to produce milk with specific medicinal properties, for instance sheep's milk used to treat cystic fibrosis.

The fish could be on United States dinner plates as early as next year and could be followed by the other animals shortly, thanks to scant intervention from the official US food safety watchdog, the Food and Drug Administation.

As with GE vegetables, the FDA's remit extends only to food safety, and so long as the mega-fish are not found to damage human health, they will be certified safe. Federal regulation, the paper says, is running well behind advances in the bio-technology sector, and the ease with which GE fish, pigs etc can reach consumers exposes the loopholes.

In what one scientific critic described as "ludicrous," the FDA has decided to treat GE salmon as a drug and not a food for regulatory purposes. It has no authority to approve new foods before they go on the market - an omission which suits the producers, many of which are big and politically influential conglomerates. Nor can the growth hormone be regulated as an "additive" because it is not deemed to change the nature or qualty of the fish. A further obstacle to the regulation of GE produce in the US is that all ecological concerns are handled by the Environmental Protection Agency, quite separately from food safety, and it is environmental concerns that could be uppermost with GE fish. The paper cited one recent study as showing that cetain types of wild fish could become extinct if they mated with GE fish: second generation GE fish are shorter-lived and may be more prone to disease than conventionally bred fish.

The mega fish being bred at a bio tech fish farm in Canada include salmon, catfish and trout that grow twice as fast as their conventional counterparts. As with GE vegetables, the developers of these mega-fish say that they will be able to feed more people, more efficiently and cheaply than conventional fish.

Such fish will be more profitable, as they take only half the time to reach marketable maturity. The new fish are produced by inserting two genes from other fish into a fertilised salmon egg; one produces growth hormone; the other "switches" it on.

- INDEPENDENT