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Food security, as a justification for GM salmon, is really laughable. I have been in salmon farming for 30 years and to my certain knowledge no one has ever suggested that salmon farming is going to save the world from starvation. It is a way to grow fish in the sea, and doing it well is expensive. We are not going to feed the world this way, and it is delusion to suggest that we will.
Added to this is the morality of owning the genetic structure of an animal. Breeding lines have always been owned, but that is not the same. Farmers can buy stock and breed from them and generate their own competing stock. Owning a gene structure means monopoly, especially of an animal that is 95% sterile. Monopoly means that control is total, and we know what happens with absolute power. The inventors of GM salmon will make huge amounts of money, they will take over the salmon industry -- and they know it.
So the real reason we are asked to take this risk is profit. I have been and remain a capitalist. I believe in profit and what it can do for society, but I am not going to sit idly by while someone goes to the bank and draws out my children's inheritance just so that they can make a buck. If government does not stand up and protect that inheritance, the biodiversity and richness of our ecosystem, at a time like this, then it is avoiding its duty to the entire human race -- present and future.
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It is our moral responsibility as a generation that has seen some of the worst environmental excesses to think deeply, ask searching questions and put in structures to contain the risks of the decisions we make, to protect future generations. We live in a time of financial insecurity that is impinging on the lives of our children because we did not think about tomorrow. Please let's not further damage what we have because we did not think about the day after tomorrow!
Yeah... this guy is an operator of a salmon farm in Scotland... Sad to know that the work you laid for your children could be destroyed by some assholes from the other side of the ocean who are so corrupt that they even don't care about anything apart the brown bags/letter containings the necessary amounts to apaise their doubts.
His frist sentence is quite eloquent : "The one thing, above all others, that I need from Government is for it to provide and protect liberty for the people and for their children. Anything which takes away from any freedom must be counterbalanced by benefit."
