July 25, 2013 — Touting a paper in the Food and Drug Law Institute’s (FDLI) Food and Drug Policy Forum, AquaBounty Technologies of Maynard, Mass., on Wednesday questioned the role of politics in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval process for its genetically modified (GM) Atlantic salmon.
“The delay associated with our approval has damaged the credibility of the FDA as an independent science-based regulatory agency,” said Ronald Stotish, CEO of AquaBounty, in a statement. “The influence of politicians and those philosophically opposed to biotechnology on what is supposed to be an evidence-based process is creating an environment of ‘regulation by referendum’ — a disservice to the health and safety of the American people.”
The FDLI point-counterpoint document, dated 24 July, included one half penned by Food & Water Watch Senior Researcher Tim Schwab and the other by a team of scientists that AquaBounty says have “longstanding relationships” with the food-safety agency.
Schwab argued that, should the FDA approve GM salmon for commercial sale, it would set a precedent for how rigorously the agency will assess biotech food animals. Its approval would, he wrote, “establish a dangerously lax legal and regulatory precedent for a whole new era of biotech animals, whose potential risks to consumer health, animal health, the environment and the economy will not be meaningfully examined by FDA prior to commercialization.” The title of his report is “Is FDA Ready to Regulate the World’s First Biotech Food Animal?”
In contrast, the team of scientists, headed by Alison Van Eenennaam, Ph.D., University of California-Davis, said the process FDA is using to regulate products from GM animals is overly rigorous, far beyond the legally required scientific analysis of food and environmental safety. No product could withstand this level of “non-science-based scrutiny,” according to the paper.
Read the full story at SeafoodSource.com