Costco Decides to Sell Controversial GM Salmon
As major supermarkets like Safeway, Target, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s refuse GM salmon, the mega store Costco is planning on selling the genetically modified fish to its customers while attempting to dress itself as a big organic seller.
This is odd, since Costco has just announced that it will become one of the largest sellers of organic products in the US, and also since Costco customers recently rallied in Seattle to deliver more than 50,000 signatures asking the company not to sell GM salmon.
Over 60 retailers representing more than 9000 stores have already publicly committed to refusing GM salmon, otherwise known as AquaAdvantage, made by the biotech company, AquaBounty Technologies, headquartered in Massachusetts.
Growth hormones from the Chinook salmon were added to AquaBounty’s GM version of the popular fish so that it can grow year round and not just during the spring and summer months. These growth hormones also affect the salmon’s overall size, but not without some serious questions about its safety.
The FDA gave AquaBounty a green light on GM Salmon even though numerous petitions were filed asking them to conduct more extensive risk studies. Food and Water Watch delivered two petitions with the following sentiment:
“For an agency responsible for 80 percent of the food that we eat—and which often touts its commitment to science-based regulations—the FDA is shockingly lenient with the quality of science it is requiring of AquaBounty. . .We can’t make science-based risk assessments based on six fish. And we can’t declare that GMO salmon is safe to eat based on a regulatory review process that treats a food product like a drug. The only appropriate course of action for FDA is to evaluate GMO salmon as a food and declare it unsafe.”
If Costco sees clearly enough to deliver organic products to its customers, who obviously demand it, then why is the company insistent on feeding them GM salmon that they don’t want? Especially since the Canadian government has issued a draft statement saying that GE salmon is not safe since it is ‘more prone to disease.’
