What role will genetically modified fish play in supplying the world with the fish it wants to eat while at the same time ensuring that declining wild fish stocks get replenished? The answer seems to depend a great deal on who you talk to.
According to Yonathan Zohar, of the University of Maryland’s Biotechnology Institute, GM fish are the wave of the future. As Zohar notes, the genetic makeup of almost every other species of livestock has been modified heavily throughout the past few millennia except fish. That is all about to change as several efforts to create genetically modified fish push forward.
A U.S. biotech firm, AF Protein, has developed a GM salmon that grows about 10 times faster than normal fish. Work is underway around the world to modify at least 25 different aquatic species including flounder, carp, lobster and shrimp.
Of course these efforts face enormous opposition from anti-biotech activists who have resorted to property destruction and other acts of violence to stop such development. The United Nations, meanwhile, is skeptical that GM fish can make any impact on the 60 to 70 percent of fisheries that are threatened. Of course the United Nations has yet to make much of a dent in that problem either, largely because it favors hard to enforce bureaucratic-minded treaties rather than property rights schemes that would give fisherman incentives to allow wild fish stocks to replenish.
Source:
GM ‘solution’ to over-fishing. The BBC, September 29, 2000.