In 2015, AquaBounty Technologies became the first company in North America, and likely the world, to get regulatory approval to sell a genetically engineered animal for human consumption. Its Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), spliced with genes from other fish, held promise because it could grow much faster than conventional farmed salmon.

However, the demand for the genetically engineered fish turned out not to be all that bountiful. The Massachusetts-based firm, which is publicly listed, announced on Dec. 11 that it was closing its last facility, ceasing fish farming activities, and culling remaining stock.

“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,” David Frank, chief financial officer and interim chief executive officer at AquaBounty, said in a statement.

A coalition of conservation and Indigenous groups that had campaigned against AquaBounty celebrated the announcement, saying the company’s work posed environmental and public health risks.

“It’s clear that there’s no place in the U.S. market for genetically engineered salmon,” Dana Perls, a senior program manager at Friends of the Earth (FoE) U.S., told Mongabay. “People don’t want to eat it.”

AquaBounty’s proponents, which include biotechnology researchers, contend that the campaign groups engaged in fearmongering. They argue that the salmon was completely safe and more sustainably produced than some farmed alternatives. Experts on both sides of the debate said the company’s failure may set an important precedent by showing other companies what a challenge it is to bring a genetically engineered animal to market.

Long-standing opposition

The AquaBounty salmon emerged from research initially done at Canada’s Memorial University of Newfoundland in the 1980s. The company, which took shape and obtained the rights to the biotechnology in the 1990s, offered the promise of a salmon that could grow to harvestable size twice as quickly as other farmed salmon, with fewer feed inputs. The genetically modified salmon could help contribute to food security amid projected growth in global protein demand, the company claimed.

“From the beginning and still to this day, I am convinced that targeted genetic modification has clear advantages to conventional breeding approaches for improving production traits in all forms of agriculture, including aquaculture,” Tillmann Benfey, an aquaculture expert at the University of New Brunswick, Canada, who collaborated on research into the salmon but didn’t have a financial stake in the company, told Mongabay. “For me, AquaBounty is a great example of how basic science can support food production, and I am sorry to see their business come to an end.”

AquaBounty also claimed its fish production would be more sustainable. It used a kind of land-based aquaculture system that some experts say has lower environmental impacts than marine aquaculture. And its facilities in eastern Canada and the U.S. Midwest would have produced salmon closer to home for North American consumers, who often buy farmed salmon imported from Norway, Scotland and Chile.

By the time AquaBounty received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2015, followed by Canadian regulators, opposition to the company’s plan was already firmly established: Industrial farming and genetic modification, of both plants and animals, have detractors, and AquaBounty’s model incorporated both.

The coalition of environmental NGOs and Indigenous groups mounted a decades-long campaign to stop AquaBounty from moving to market sales. They argued that the company’s effort was a way of doubling down on an industrial food system predicated on the overcrowding of animals — an attempt to “fix the animal instead of the farm,” as FoE’s Perls put it — and warned that any escapes would threaten wild salmon populations, though AquaBounty insisted that it was instituting strong safeguards to prevent this.

Many members of Indigenous groups in the Pacific Northwest consider themselves “Salmon People” and view the animal as sacred. They argued that genetic modification of salmon violated their sovereignty over their food and the 1850s treaties with the U.S. granting them fishing rights. No government agencies or business representatives consulted with them about the AquaBounty project, they said.

The Indigenous critics further argued that AquaBounty was commodifying a wild animal meant to migrate and be part of a larger web of life. Carl Wassilie, a Yupik biologist and organizer with Block Corporate Salmon, an advocacy group, told Mongabay that AquaBounty salmon were “stuck in a holding tank in a warehouse surrounded by barbed wire.”

“This isn’t anything close to what a salmon is,” Wassilie said. “Let alone a ‘sustainable’ system.”

The opposition campaign spawned results: By 2019, about 80 U.S. companies, including retail giants Walmart, Costco and Whole Foods, had pledged not to sell genetically engineered salmon. In 2020, a U.S. federal court ruled that the FDA needed to reassess the environmental impacts of AquaBounty’s salmon, following a lawsuit brought by the Center for Food Safety and Earthjustice, two advocacy groups.

Still, the business moved forward. In 2021, AquaBounty announced the first commercial-scale harvest of its genetically engineered salmon. The company took in about $2.9 million in sales of the salmon in 2022, its top year, though it was still operating at a huge loss; most of the sales were in the U.S. and the majority were to just three companies, U.S. filings show.

Alison Van Eenennaam, an animal biotechnology specialist at the University of California, Davis, who was a temporary member of a committee that reviewed the FDA’s work on the AquaBounty salmon at a stage of the approval process, told Mongabay that AquaBounty’s problem wasn’t poor sales. Instead, it was “the 20-year wrangling with the lawsuits that the activist industry initiated,” which she described as “a huge financial drain on the company.”

“I find it quite hypocritical for the activists to say that it was market failure when they created the market failure and also the expenses that created the failure of the company,” she said.

Uncertain future for GMO animals

Van Eenennaam argued that “green” activist groups reflexively oppose technological advance and stymy agricultural innovation, particularly with regard to the genetic modification of animals.

“If the message is that these activist groups are going to be so vehemently opposed to it, what industry, what company would invest in it in the future?” she said.

Campaigners, on the other hand, say they’re pleased that such a message may have been sent. Perls said AquaBounty’s failure “is a significant signal that people don’t want genetically engineered fish or genetically engineered animals, and hopefully this signal is a precedent setter that we need to be focused on sustainable food systems with sustainably caught wild salmon.”

The FDA has so far approved only one other genetically modified animal for human consumption: a pig designed to help avoid triggering allergies. It was developed by Revivicor, a company affiliated with Virginia Tech’s Corporate Research Center. Other applications for the use of genetically engineered animals in food are under review, but the details are confidential, Juli Putnam, an FDA spokeswoman, told Mongabay in an emailed statement.

A representative of AquaBounty Technologies declined to comment for this article, saying the company could only share its press release. Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a lobby group that employs a former AquaBounty CEO, sent Mongabay only general statements about the benefits of animal biotechnology in response to an inquiry about the company.

Banner image: The National Family Farm Coalition protests genetically engineered salmon at an event in Berea, Kentucky in August 2024. Image courtesy of the National Family Farm Coalition.

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