As a result of over two decades of legal actions and campaigning, the troubled biotechnology company AquaBounty has announced that it is stopping production of all genetically modified salmon, and will close its last remaining facility on Prince Edward Island, Canada.
AquaBounty’s GMO salmon, called AquAdvantage, was the first-ever GMO food animal to be approved anywhere in the world, by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2015. But, as a result of successful litigation brought by Center for Food Safety and boycott campaigns, it never made it onto the market.
In 2020, after five years of litigation, CFS prevailed as a federal court held that the U.S. government’s approval of this first ever GE animal was unlawful and sent it back to the FDA for reassessment and a new decision. The Court ruled that the approval violated the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, and that going forward FDA had a duty to ensure the environmental safety of any GMO animals.
“Yesterday’s announcement proves what we have always said: that this dangerous product cannot both comply with environmental laws and become a commercial reality,” said Amy van Saun, senior attorney for Center for Food Safety and counsel in the case. “It’s gratifying that this risk to our wild fisheries and oceans is at an end, and we will continue to demand that our government prevents such risky profit-driven experiments from coming to our oceans and our plates.”
The approval of the first ever GMO animal for food was extremely controversial, prompting nearly 2 million people to tell the FDA in opposition and with Congress holding multiple hearings. Food safety concerns were raised about the novel product, as well as the risks to endangered wild salmon and the broader ocean ecosystems from escapes, which are commonplace in industrial aquaculture. A broad coalition of opponents joined together in the campaign and as CFS clients in the litigation, including fishing organizations, conservationists, and tribal nations.
“While the demise of the AquaBounty salmon is a landmark victory for public health and the environment, the specter of future similarly wrongheaded GMO food animals remains. We will be pushing the new administration to deny any future approvals of GMO food animals, among other efforts to keep our food supply safe,” said Jaydee Hanson, policy director at the Center for Food Safety, who has led the GMO fish campaign since its inception.
AquaBounty has been slowly scaling down its operations over the last year. In February 2023, AquaBounty announced the closure of its GMO salmon production facility at Rollo Bay, Prince Edward Island. In July 2024, the company sold its only US-based plant in Indiana. Yesterday’s announcement confirms the company is now also shutting down its remaining facility at Bay Fortune in Prince Edward Island, which was meant to produce GMO salmon eggs for a proposed facility in Ohio. Construction of the Ohio operation has been on hold since 2023. In yesterday’s announcement, AquaBounty indicated plans to assess alternatives to the Ohio operation.
While refined GMO commodity crops are often used in highly processed foods, the AquaBounty GMO salmon remains the only ever GMO food animal approved for human consumption. Even if it had ever become a commercial reality, as a result of public campaigns led by expert groups, over 80 food retailers like Walmart, Costco, and Kroger, the three largest food service companies (Aramark, Sodexo and Compass Group), and major restaurants like Red Lobster and Legal Seafood have made commitments to not sell GMO salmon.
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