AquaBounty Technologies, a land based salmon farming operation with genetically modified fish, has announced that the company will shut down operations.
“AquaBounty will immediately begin to wind down its Bay Fortune operation, its only remaining operating farm,” said David Frank, Chief Financial Officer and Interim Chief Executive Officer in a statement. “We prioritized maintaining operations at the Bay Fortune facility, but do not have sufficient liquidity to continue to do so. We have been working for over a year to raise capital, including the sale of our farms and equipment. Unfortunately, these efforts have not generated enough cash to maintain our operating facilities.”
The company as been under fire from various groups for what they called “Frankenfish.” AquaBounty said it did a gene modification “one time” 30 years ago and “focuses on a specific gene trait within the Atlantic salmon that helps protect it during the early, most vulnerable stages of growth” in order to increase harvest and demand less feed.
Several fishing and environmental groups filed a complaint against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for approving the salmon, saying “AquaBounty’s GE salmon is a novel, man-made animal: an Atlantic salmon genetically engineered with genes from a deep water ocean eelpout and a Pacific Chinook salmon in order to make it grow unnaturally fast…. FDA failed to consult with the federal fish and wildlife agencies to insure that its approval of AquaBounty’s application was not likely to jeopardize endangered and threatened species or adversely modify critical habitat.”
In 2020, a federal court ruled that the FDA “violated core environmental laws in approving the genetically engineered salmon” and ordered the agency to thoroughly analyze the environmental consequences of an escape to the wild of a genetically engineered salmon.
In May of 2024, the FDA issued a press release asserting its authority over GMO animals quoting director of the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine as saying “we as an agency need to keep our regulatory approach current with the evolution of the science.”
Polls, however, show that consumers are wary of genetically modified proteins and think that’s taking genetic modification too far.
Carl Wassilie, a Yup’ik biologist, co-founder of Salmonberry Tribal Associates, and organizer with Block Corporate Salmon was quoted on the Non-GMO project responding to the news of AquaBounty’s shut down: “The development of GE salmon violates Wild Salmon, and all the human and more-than-human communities that Wild Salmon support. Wild Salmon underpin our cultural, spiritual, emotional, and physical wellbeing as Indigenous Salmon Peoples. We need to build on this victory to ensure that no other company takes up the colonial project of genetically engineering salmon.”
