Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
from Tales from the Trail:
Salmon ‘chanted evening?
The one word that leaped out of President Obama's State of the Union address to Congress wasn't "optimism," "business," "teachers," "economy" or "budget."
To those who listened to the speech on National Public Radio, the memorable term was "salmon," writ large in a word cloud NPR compiled from its listeners after Obama finished.
That kind of makes sense. Without the Punch-and-Judy theater of Republicans and Democrats popping up from their seats to cheer or boo, as they customarily do when they're seated on opposing sides of the room for a presidential address, it was up to the Commander in Chief to deliver some chuckle-worthy lines.
Obama got his biggest laugh for this rather understated poke at overlapping federal bureaucracies:
"There are 12 different agencies that deal with exports. There are at least five different agencies that deal with housing policy. Then there's my favorite example: the Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they're in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they're in saltwater. (Laughter.) I hear it gets even more complicated once they're smoked. (Laughter and applause.)"
(No offense, Mr. President, but this was kind of an easy room if you got such a boffo response to this joke. Plenty of Facebook and Twitter posters wondered why you didn't mention cream cheese and bagels.)
This being Washington, though, it didn't end there.
Genetically engineered fish, anyone?
Would you eat a genetically modified fish? What about pork from a pig with mouse genes? Beef from cattle with genes spliced to resist “mad cow” disease?
These are questions Americans may soon have to answer for themselves if the U.S. health regulators allow the sale of a genetically engineered salmon. The company that makes it, Aqua Bounty Technologies Inc <ABTX.L>, expects an agency decision by year’s end.
The biotech says its Atlantic salmon grows nearly twice as fast as normal salmon and could help Americans get more locally farmed fish. That could cut down on U.S. imports of roughly $1.4 billion a year in Atlantic salmon from other countries such as Chile while also easing pressure on wild Atlantic salmon in the nation’s Northeast.
But environmentalists and consumer advocates are concerned about what could happen if such altered fish were to escape or be released in rivers or off-shore salmon farms. They also worry about the health effects of eating such modified fish.
The Food and Drug Administration takes up the issue starting Sept. 19 as part of a three-day public hearing on whether to allow the genetically altered salmon on the U.S. market.
For more on the salmon situation, click here. For other genetically engineered food animals that aren’t far behind, click here.
Photo credit: Reuters/Victor Ruiz Caballero (Workers process farmed salmon at a plant in Chile. The fish shown in the photo are not genetically modified.)
Still the Prez has a point. One agency should be handling something like Salmon. It is a result of so many agencies handling so many things that has resulted in the strange system today. A system in which the FDA has no power to recall tainted food from the food system (although I hear that is changing) because that is not in their jurisdiction. This delegation is what causes the problems we have with improper enforcement. It is much easier to pass the buck when everyone is responsible for something only one agency should be responsible for.