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Franken Salmon, CAFOs and GM Feed

Factory farming of salmon, allegedly a more “sustainable” alternative to industrial mining of wild salmon, depends to a large extent on using ground up anchovies as feed. Thus it decimates another wild fishery. This generates the problem of declining anchovy populations and insufficient feed to fuel the overproducing salmon factory.

The government, corporations, scientific establishment, and mainstream media then use this purely artificial problem as the pretext to tout GMO “solutions”. They do this for mundane profit purposes and toward more far-reaching goals of political power and eugenic control of GM animals and eventually GM humans.

In this case, anchovy-based feed as well as non-GM algae (also used extensively, and still available in adequate volume) are slated to be superseded by feed based onĀ GM camelina modified with algae DNA to cause it to produce long-chain omega-3 oil. The fish fed on this material then will be touted as “healthy” to eat.

A laboratory feeding trial with this GM camelina currently is underway in Britain. As always with such trials, it’s not a food safety trial but only studies whether the animal quickly reaches slaughter weight. Nor will there ever be a study on the food safety for humans who eat animals fed this way. Once GM salmon are fed on GM feed it’ll be double exposure.

Note how the so-called “scientists” quoted in the piece think exclusively in terms of capitalist ideology, especially the Orwellian lie that government-subsidized supply-driven overproduction (in this case CAFO feed and farmed salmon), supplemented by consumerist propaganda, equals some natural mechanism of supply and demand.

In reality there is no such “demand” except where artificially juiced by propaganda and retail prices kept deceptively low by hiding most of the costs and simply refusing to pay the environmental costs. But this environmental debt is vastly greater than the national debt. (National debts are denominated in money and owed to other money-mongers, and therefore can be written off without much trouble. But civilization’s mounting debt to Gaia is existential, biological, not financial; and it cannot be written off. On the contrary the Earth, perhaps at first slowly but all the more surely, will insist on payment in full, with interest.)

Reject the false capitalist way of thinking, and the gratuitous idiocy of the whole CAFO/GMO paradigm becomes clear.

Fish farming is as bad as any other factory farming. Good land is condemned in order to grow the feed while human food production is driven onto more marginal land or just driven out completely. CAFOs are disease incubators, in the case of salmon frequently spreading disease to already beleaguered wild populations. CAFOs especially are designed to drive antibiotic resistance among human pathogens leading to the collapse of antibiotics as a medically effective treatment.

Factory farming drives many socioeconomic evils, destroying community ways of life and community economies of farming and fishing for human food rather than for mass commodity production. CAFOs are ongoing atrocities against the animals exploited by them, physically and morally the descendants of Auschwitz.

Anyone who could do this to non-human animals also would do it to humans, and anyone who could tolerate this level of animal cruelty would tolerate this level of cruelty to people. Nor is there any good reason to believe it’s less cruel for salmon than it is for chickens, pigs, cows.

And then in cases like this, the self-generated problems of factory farming are used as a pretext for the existential aggression of the genetic engineering regime.

On the other hand, no wild fish have evolved to withstand industrial fishing methods. All commercial fisheries are unsustainable. Salmon also are the special targets of dams. The attempted murder of rivers also murders the salmon who migrate up those rivers.

There is no ecological way to consume commercially extracted fish. Those who work toward an ecological way of life have to abjure commercial fish completely. This also would purge many poisons from the diet, from the mercury which accumulates in big predator fish to the incipient danger of GM salmon, the most dangerous kind of GMO for food safety because unlike commodity GM maize or soy it’s a true direct GM food designed to be eaten directly.

Any food safety danger from genetic engineering itself will be maximized by such direct frankenfoods as GM salmon, RNAi potatoes, GM “non-browning” apples and others.