Genetically modified pork. Are we ready for it?
It's billed as an animal that will be good for the environment, the questions that remain include whether the government will approve it and whether consumers will want to put this pork on their fork.
It's called Enviropig, a development of the University of Guelph that was given the green light by Environment Canada last month. The people behind Enviropig say the goal is to produce a less polluting hog, one that produces manure with less phosphorus, a chemical that when concentrated can pollute water tables, rivers and streams near pig farms. What may have consumers uneasy is the way this pig is derived, it involves genetic mutation. In order to produce a pig that emits a less phosphorus manure, the inventors spliced the DNA of mice into the pig.
Scientists have been working on Enviropig for 10 years with a goal of commercialising this product for sale to farmers and ultimately the dinner plate. The approval by Environment Canada allows for limited and controlled transfers of the new strain of pig to other locations for further study and breeding but they cannot legally be sold for human consumption without approval of Health Canada. Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq has an application before her department that would allow Enviropig to bred and sold for the dinner plate, requests for comment from both the minister's office and her departmental officials have been made with no response so far. A similar application has been made to the US Food and Drug Administration.
One of the key worries of opponents of what is scientifically called "transgenic meat" is that under current Canadian regulation there is no need to label something like Enviropig as anything other than pork. If approved by Health Canada, consumers could end up eating pork spliced with mouse DNA and not know it. There are attempts to make other transgenic animals for human consumption as well such as the rainbow trout unveiled by the University of Rhode Island last week. In that case scientists injected the fish with a chemical from Belgian blue cattle to produce more muscle mass and therefore bigger fillets from the fish without increasing the amount of feed used. Promoters describe the fish as having six-pack abs.
Green Party Leader Elizabeth May says farmers have been improving crops and animals through crossbreeding and cross-pollination for millennia but the case of Enviropig and other genetically modified animals is quite different. "Genetic modification," says May, "involves bringing in genes from another species through a process that is laboratory. It is not what you do in the field." May says given how strongly the Canadian government has resisted labelling crops such as corn as being genetically modified, it is highly doubtful that pigs spliced with mouse DNA would require labelling either. "I don't know how anyone would know the difference" says May. Clearly though she is concerned, "It raises a lot of questions around health, long-term issues, it raises ethical issues and large environmental issues."
NDP Agriculture Critic Alex Atamanenko an MP from British Columbia's southern interior is concerned as well. Atamanenko thinks this could hurt Canada's pork industry. Some countries already ban or limit genetically modified crops, if Enviropig were released, it would be difficult he says to show the world that the rest of Canada's pork exports were in fact GMO free which could lead to Canadian pork exports facing bans. "I think we have a very good pork industry here," says Atamanenko. "We have to find a way to help them, we need to find a way to help them farm sustainably. The answer is not to bring in some kind of monster pig to solve our problem."
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