http://thisishell.net

The Nine Circles of Hell! – all the news that gives you fits in print – for Friday, September 3, 2010, including bonus stories on health care costs and Israeli settlements, are:

Companies force entire health care premium increase on workers

Warming means less water, more smog, worse weather for LA

CIA says Mossad is least trustworthy of friendly spy agencies

Israelis expand settlements, defying their own government

Israelis not all that concerned about peace with Palestinians

Sunni Taliban suspected in bombing at Shia pro-Palestinian rally

Congo mass rape tally grows; questions arise over UN role

Mass animal extinction could mean a new geologic epoch

Is the first genetically altered animal heading for your dining table?

Companies force entire health care premium increase on workers
McClatchy Newspapers
(9/2/10)

Survey: Employers still shifting insurance costs to workers

An annual survey released Thursday finds that workers are paying, on average, about $482 more for job-based family health insurance this year as companies force employees to shoulder more of the burden of health care costs.

The premium hike, up 14 percent from last year, means that workers are paying nearly all of a $495 increase in the average cost of family coverage this year.

Employers’ contributions to family coverage showed no increase at all in 2010, according to the Employer Health Benefits Survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health

Drew Altman, the president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation, said it was the first time he could remember employers moving so boldly to shift health costs to workers.

“Added health costs for workers means added economic insecurity for working people in tough times,” Altman said. He called the move a “recession survival tactic” for struggling employers, who provide coverage for about 157 million Americans.

“It speaks to the pressure that companies are under from the recession,” he said.

Over the last five years, workers’ share of premiums has increased by $1,300, or 47 percent, Altman said, while overall coverage costs are up 27 percent. Over the same period, wages climbed 18 percent and general inflation rose 12 percent. With health coverage costs growing faster than wages and inflation are, weary consumers can’t seem to catch a break …

Even as they pay more, workers are getting fewer benefits. The survey found that 30 percent of employers reduced benefits or increased out-of-pocket costs, while 23 percent raised premiums. Employers also are raising annual deductibles …

“Insurance is getting stingier and less comprehensive every year,” Altman said.

• The New York Times article, “Employers Push Costs for Health on Workers,” adds this:
  In contrast to past practices of absorbing higher prices, some companies chose this year to keep their costs the same by passing the entire increase in premiums for family coverage onto their workers, according to a new survey released on Thursday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research group.

Warming means less water, more smog, worse weather for LA
Scientific American
(9/3/10)

How Can Los Angeles Adapt to Coming Climate Change?

Climate change can’t alter the blue skies or access to the beach and mountains, but it will pose four tangible threats: The summers will grow hotter, the air will be smoggier, there will be more fires, and there will be much less water. In other words, as we saw in chapter 3, climate change is going to shift the competitive landscape of cities, and LA is going to take a hit. And the poorest parts of LA are going to be hurt worst of all. But there’s a lot we can learn from an examination of LA’s probable future—especially the basic lesson that prices matter. Other cities take note. Our tour of LA will show us the key role that market prices of both electricity and water will play in determining this city’s fate. In addition, this case study will highlight how government policy (such as binding land use zoning and caps on water prices) can unintentionally hinder adaptation …

Climate change will likely degrade LA’s ideal climate. Leading climate researchers have developed two different models that allow them to predict each U.S. county’s average temperature and rainfall by month for the years 2070 to 2099. Two computer models, with the catchy names CCSM Model and H3A1FI Model, bear bad news. Los Angeles County is predicted to be 13 degrees F warmer on average in July by 2070. The problem for current LA real estate owners (such as myself) is that a fair bit of the value of their assets (my home) rests on the fact that relatively few areas in the United States feature warm winters and cool summers. In the future LA’s climate will look like Jacksonville, Florida’s, climate today. This is bad news for my housing wealth.

You might try to soothe my spirits by reminding me that all cities will face hotter summers. Unfortunately for you, dear reader, I know the lost art of statistics. I have crunched the data to study the relationship between county home prices and county climate conditions. What jumps out from this analysis is that areas with cool summers and warm winters command a huge real estate price premium. There are relatively few such areas (mostly in California), and they are in high demand. Climate change is predicted to strip away much of California’s climate uniqueness, and therefore will strip away the housing price boost that comes with that climate. Mean July temperatures close to 90 degrees F by the late twenty-first century will force down relative real estate prices to reflect underlying changes in climate amenities.

Climate change will cause the most “amenity havoc” for cities in California. San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles are all expected to be big climate amenity losers. The one piece of good news is that California’s major cities are not expected to become much more humid. Climate experts do not believe that there are any plausible scenarios in which California becomes much more humid in summertime in general. After all, climate change is not going to change the fundamentally dry subtropical climate of this region in summer.

In contrast, cities in Florida will actually experience an improvement in their climate bundle as winter temperatures increase (an amenity) and summer average temperatures rise relatively little. Only three major U.S. metropolitan areas are expected to experience an improvement in their climate bundle due to climate change. These are Las Vegas, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach. In the case of Las Vegas, its climate bundle will improve because of predicted increases in rainfall. A critic of these climate prediction models would be appalled that they predict an average temperature over an enormous land area such as Los Angeles County, which is more than 4,000 square miles. By definition, such an “average” prediction must mask huge variations. In areas of West Los Angeles such as Santa Monica and Malibu, the cool breeze off the Pacific Ocean will cool the expensive homes of the elite. But inland, in East Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, temperatures already soar into the 100s in summer and are likely to be much hotter in the face of climate change. This suggests that small pockets of West Los Angeles, such as expensive Santa Monica, Brentwood, and Westwood, could actually grow more valuable as the rest of Los Angeles becomes less inhabitable. Millions of people who live in expensive San Fernando Valley homes will suffer from home price declines as their climate amenity premium vanishes.

The poor and immigrants will bear the brunt of exposure to heat waves and midsummer extreme temperatures. As a point of comparison, consider the Chicago heat wave of 1995, which disproportionately killed members of elderly poor black households in the center city. They did not own air conditioners, and their fear of crime led them to not open their windows. The public health consequences of such heat waves depend on whether “victims” know that a heat wave is coming and have access to coping strategies. Not everyone can jump on a plane and head to Idaho for a week during the peak heat.

We count on public service announcements to alert people of an impending event, such as a smog alert (when ambient air pollution is expected to be above a critical threshold level that threatens public health) or a heat wave, or in Asia that a tsunami is brewing. But how do we inform groups that face language and cultural barriers? In inland Los Angeles, the population is mostly Hispanic. Many of the members of these households do not speak fluent English, and some are in the United States illegally. Such individuals are unlikely to be interested in or willing to follow information provided by government sources. These are exactly the people who are most at risk from the shock. Fortunately, community-based NGOs have stepped up to fill this void. In Eastern Los Angeles, one example is the Esperanza’s Community Health Programs, which has been involved in the community by providing access to health information. Such unheralded “little guys” help a diverse city prepare for heat wave challenges.

Given its topography and climate patterns and the scale of economic activity in the metropolitan area, the Los Angeles Basin suffers from some of the highest levels of air pollution in the United States. During the 1970s, before the introduction of stringent new vehicle emissions regulation that began in California in 1972, LA was the smog capital. Millions of people were driving high-emitting vehicles. Polluting oil-refining activity in the Long Beach area contributed to the local smog problem. Old, dirty diesel trucks carrying goods from the Port of Long Beach to consumers around the United States helped to scale up deadly particulate matter concentrations.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, smog levels were awful in Los Angeles. Starting in the mid-1990s, ambient ozone declined sharply in Los Angeles County. Across eight monitoring stations that monitored ambient ozone in 1980 and in 2000, the average annual pollution daily excedence (when air pollution exceeds the Clean Air Act standard) count for these eight monitors declined from 103 days per year to 13 days per year.

These pollution gains are especially notable because between 1980 and 2000, the Los Angeles Basin’s population grew by 42 percent and total automobile mileage grew by 88 percent. Vehicle emissions control regulation deserves a lot of credit. New cars today are 95 percent cleaner than new cars built in the early 1970s. These emissions control improvements persist over time even as the vehicle ages. Put simply, emissions per mile of driving have decreased faster over time in Los Angeles than miles driven have increased.

Climate change could reverse some of this progress. The details of atmospheric chemistry concerning how volatile organic compounds and oxides of nitrogen mix to form ozone are complicated, but it can be said that heat waves are likely to cook up more summertime smog. Smog problems will grow the most away from the ocean, in East Los Angeles. Relative to West Los Angeles, East LA’s communities are poorer and have more Hispanic residents. Due to this differential pollution exposure across demographic groups, climate change will bring environmental justice concerns to the forefront.

It is no surprise that wealthy, white households live in cool, clean West Los Angeles, while poorer Hispanics are more likely to live in the hot, smoggy eastern section of the city. For homes that sold in 2008, the average price of a home declined by 1.4 percent with each kilometer of distance from the beach. This housing price gradient guarantees that wealthy people will cluster closer to the high-amenity area. If climate change increases smog exposure for poor minorities, this would reverse twenty years of progress in achieving environmental justice goals due to effective Clean Air Act regulation. In earlier work, I documented that between 1980 and 2000, the average Hispanic household in Los Angeles was exposed to thirty fewer smoggy days a year because of disproportionate improvements in air quality in communities where Hispanics tend to live. Climate change may reverse this progress …

Despite the fact that it rarely rains in Los Angeles, households in this desert area have no incentive to view water as a scarce commodity. They are charged less than one cent per gallon of water. Public water authorities refuse to engage in “price gouging,” which makes voters happy in the short run—we get to enjoy our swimming pools and ample green grass. But it means that a day of reckoning lurks in the notso- distant future. Low prices remove any incentive to get “lean and mean” and reduce one’s water use. This low pricing creates a culture of waste. When my family goes for a walk in our neighborhood near UCLA, we are amazed at the gallons of water being used for watering the lawns and, due to broken pipes and other mishaps, just flooding the roads. Los Angeles has created a “hot line” for reporting such water wastage. Like an Eastern European living under communism, I have reported my neighbors to this “Secret Water  Police.” Why? Although I dislike my neighbors, I especially dislike their wasting a scarce resource for no good reason. But nobody from City Hall has ever gotten in touch with me, and nobody has given me a medal …

Growing Southern California faces a fundamental water challenge. If we are serious about getting ready to adapt to climate change, then we must allow the prices of water and electricity to reflect their true scarcity. By reducing the supply of available water, climate change will create an imperative, forcing reluctant governments to recognize that water prices must reflect the basic fundamentals of supply and demand. If demand is rising (due to income and population growth) and supply is declining (due to climate change), then the water authorities face a choice between allowing prices to rise or setting up a complex rationing scheme. Rationing makes economists nuts because it is the equivalent of handing a vegetarian a meat pizza to eat and telling the vegetarian that he or she cannot trade it to a meat lover. The authorities are struggling to cope with these expected imbalances in supply and demand caused by ongoing economic growth and climate change.

CIA says Mossad is least trustworthy of friendly spy agencies
The Washington Post
(9/2/10)

Israeli spies wooing U.S. Muslims, sources say

The CIA took an internal poll not long ago about friendly foreign intelligence agencies.

The question, mostly directed to employees of the clandestine service branch, was: Which are the best allies among friendly spy services, in terms of liaison with the CIA, and which are the worst? In other words, who acts like, well, friends?

“Israel came in dead last,” a recently retired CIA official told me the other day.

Not only that, he added, throwing up his hands and rising from his chair, “the Israelis are number three, with China number one and Russia number two,” in terms of how aggressive they are in their operations on U.S. soil.

Israel’s undercover operations here, including missions to steal U.S. secrets, are hardly a secret at the FBI, CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. From time to time, in fact, the FBI has called Israeli officials on the carpet to complain about a particularly brazen effort to collect classified or other sensitive information, in particular U.S. technical and industrial secrets …

As tensions with Iran escalate, according to former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, “Israeli agents have become more aggressive in targeting Muslims living in the United States as well as in operating against critics.”

“There have been a number of cases reported to the FBI about Mossad officers who have approached leaders in Arab-American communities and have falsely represented themselves as ‘U.S. intelligence,’ ” Giraldi wrote recently in American Conservative magazine.

“Because few Muslims would assist an Israeli, this is done to increase the likelihood that the target will cooperate. It’s referred to as a ‘false flag’ operation.”

Giraldi’s piece continued, “Mossad officers sought to recruit Arab-Americans as sources willing to inform on their associates and neighbors. The approaches, which took place in New York and New Jersey, were reportedly handled clumsily, making the targets of the operation suspicious.”

“These Arab-Americans turned down the requests for cooperation,” Giraldi added,”and some of the contacts were eventually reported to the FBI, which has determined that at least two of the Mossad officers are, ironically, Israeli Arabs operating out of Israel’s mission to the United Nations in New York under cover as consular assistants.”

“Oh, sure, they do that,” the other former CIA official said, waving a dismissing hand, when I asked about Giraldi’s story. “They’re all over the place.”

The FBI did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

But a retired senior FBI counterintelligence official told SpyTalk, “They have always been extremely aggressive, and seem to feel they can operate whenever and wherever they want, in spite of being called on the carpet more than any other country by probably a factor of three times as often” …

They don’t begrudge the Jewish state’s interest in keeping track of its potential or real enemies, including here — indeed, they often say Israel is America’s best friend in the Middle East.

Which, they say, makes Mossad’s impersonation of U.S. intelligence agents all the more galling.

Israelis expand settlements, defying their own government
Reuters
(9/2/10)

Settlers defy peace talks with new construction across West Bank

Hours before peace talks were set to begin in Washington, Jewish settlers defiantly announced plans on Thursday to launch new construction in their West Bank enclaves in a test of strength with Palestinian Islamists.

Naftali Bennett, director of the settlers’ Yesha council, said settlers would begin building homes and public structures in at least 80 settlements, breaking a partial government freeze on building that ends on September 26.

“The idea is that de facto it (the freeze) is over,” Bennett said, criticizing the U.S.-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian talks as aiming for a “phony peace” and rejecting Palestinian demands for a halt to settlement building on land they want for a state.

“Once they understand Israelis are here to stay and only growing stronger day by day, they will give up,” Bennett said.

The settlers, who have threatened to depose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he does not let them resume building after September 26, ended the freeze unilaterally on Wednesday, the day after gunmen killed four settlers in the occupied West Bank.

Pro-settler parties are a majority in Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition and a number of cabinet ministers have already backed demands to resume settlement construction.

Earth-moving vehicles and cement mixers went to work in several settlements on Wednesday, breaking ground for homes and community centers.

Bennett said settlers had decided to double the number of building starts after news that two Israelis had been wounded in a separate West Bank shooting on Wednesday evening. The Islamist Palestinian group Hamas claimed both attacks.

“The real test between the Palestinians’ radical Islam and Israel is the on-the-ground test of who is stronger and who is here to stay,” Bennett said.

“Once they (Palestinians) understand Israel is here to stay and only growing stronger day by day, they will give up …”

Many settlers oppose the two-state solution backed by the United States and see the West Bank, captured by Israel from Jordan during the Six Day War in 1967, as Israel’s biblical birthright.

• According to the Agence France Presse article, “Ahmadinejad says Mideast peace talks ‘doomed’,” the settlers agree with the Iranian president:
  Calling Western-backed Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas a hostage of Israel, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the talks that he began with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington on Thursday lacked legitimacy as he had no right to make concessions in the name of the Palestinian people.
  “What do they want to negotiate about? Who are they representing? What are they going to talk about?” he asked rhetorically about Abbas’s negotiating team.
  “Who gave them the right to sell a piece of Palestinian land? The people of Palestine and the people of the region will not allow them to sell even an inch of Palestinian soil to the enemy. The negotiations are stillborn and doomed” …
  “The fate of Palestine will be decided in Palestine and by the resistance of Palestinians and not in Washington, Paris or London,” Ahmadinejad said.
• Meanwhile, Israeli scholars are joining their compatriot actors in a boycott of the settlements, according to the BBC story, “Israeli academics boycott West Bank settlements”:
  More than 150 Israeli academics say they will no longer lecture or work in Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
  In a letter, they said they supported the recent decision by a group of actors and others not to take part in cultural activity there.
  The academics said that acceptance of the settlements caused “critical” damage to Israel’s chances of achieving peace with the Palestinians.
  The actors were criticised for refusing to perform at a new cultural centre.

Israelis not all that concerned about peace with Palestinians
TIME
(9/2/10)

Why Israelis Don’t Care About Peace with Palestinians

Heli and Eli sell condos on Exodus Street, a name that evokes a certain historical hardship in a neighborhood that suggests none at all, the ingathering of the Jews having entered a whole new realm here. The talk in the little office is of interest rates and panoramic sea views from handsomely appointed properties selling on the Ashdod waterfront for half what people are asked to pay in Tel Aviv, 18 miles (29 km) to the north. And sell they do, hand over fist – never mind the rockets that fly out of Gaza, 14 miles (22.5 km) to the south. “Even when the Qassams  fell, we continued to sell!” says Heli Itach, slapping a palm on the office desk. The skull on her designer shirt is made of sequins spelling out “Love Kills Slowly.” “What the people see on the TV there is not true here,” she says. “I sold, this week, 12 apartments. You’re not client, I tell you the truth.”

The truth? In the week that three Presidents, a King and their own Prime Minister gather at the White House to begin a fresh round of talks on peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the truth is, Israelis are no longer preoccupied with the matter. They’re otherwise engaged; they’re making money; they’re enjoying the rays of late summer. A watching world may still define their country by the blood feud with the Arabs whose families used to live on this land and whether that conflict can be negotiated away, but Israelis say they have moved on …

But wait. Deep down (you can almost hear the outside world ask), don’t Israelis know that finding peace with the Palestinians is the only way to guarantee their happiness and prosperity? Well, not exactly. Asked in a March poll to name the “most urgent problem” facing Israel, just 8% of Israeli Jews cited the conflict with Palestinians, putting it fifth behind education, crime, national security and poverty. Israeli Arabs placed peace first, but among Jews here, the issue that President Obama calls “critical for the world” just doesn’t seem – critical.

Another whack for the desk. “The people,” Heli says, “don’t believe.” Eli searches for a word. “People in Israel are indifferent,” he decides. “They don’t care if there’s going to be war. They don’t care if there’s going to be peace. They don’t care. They live in the day.”

Sunni Taliban suspected in bombing at Shia pro-Palestinian rally
Reuters
(9/3/10)

Pakistan: Dozens killed in pro-Palestinian rally

A suicide bomber struck a rally in the Pakistani city of Quetta on Friday, killing up to 43 people in the second major attack this week, piling pressure on a government struggling with a flood crisis.

The attack on the Shiite rally expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people came as the United States said the devastating floods are likely to delay army offensives against Taliban insurgents.

“Unfortunately the flooding in Pakistan is probably going to delay any operations by the Pakistani army in North Waziristan for some period of time,” US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in Afghanistan where he is visiting US troops.

More than 100 people were wounded in the Quetta attack, which like triple bombings at a Shiite procession in the city of Lahore this week, bore the hallmarks of the Taliban who often attack religious minorities to destablize the government …

Earlier, the al Qaeda-linked Taliban took responsibility for Wednesday’s bombings in Lahore, further challenging the civilian government struggling to cope a month after devastating floods.

Aside from its battles against homegrown Taliban, Pakistan is under intense American pressure to tackle Afghan Taliban fighters who cross the border to attack US-led NATO troops.

Pakistan has said the army would decide when to carry out a full-fledged assault in North Waziristan, where Washington says anti-American militants enjoy safe havens, at the time it considers appropriate.

The Lahore blasts, which killed 33 people, were the first major attack since flood waters tore through the country. “It’s revenge for the killings of innocent Sunnis,” a spokesman for Qari Hussain Mehsud, mentor of the Taliban’s suicide bombers, told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location …

Islamist charities, some of them linked to militant groups, have at the same time joined in the relief effort for the millions affected by the worst floods in the nation’s history.

US officials are concerned that the involvement of hardline groups in flood relief will undermine the fight against militancy in Pakistan as well Afghanistan.

Anger is spreading over the government’s sluggish response to the floods, raising the possibility of social unrest …

Pakistan is also faced with an economic catastrophe, with the floods causing damage the government has estimated at $43 billion, almost one quarter of the South Asian nation’s 2009 GDP.

Some relief has come from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It will give Pakistan $450 million in emergency flood aid and disburse funds in September to help the country’s economy cope with the devastation of the floods.

Talks in Washington with a delegation led by Pakistan’s Finance Minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh on the terms of an $11 billion IMF loan program left him satisfied with the country’s commitment to reforms, the IMF chief said.

Under the 2008 IMF loan program, Islamabad pledged to implement tax and energy sector reforms and give full autonomy to the State Bank of Pakistan.

Congo mass rape tally grows; questions arise over UN role
The New York Times
(9/2/10)

Rape Victims in Congo Raid Now More Than 240

The number of rape victims from a four-day rebel attack in eastern Congo a month ago has risen to more than 240 and will likely go higher, aid officials said Thursday.

Giorgio Trombatore, a director of the aid group International Medical Corps, said investigators working in eastern Congo’s North Kivu Province had so far “counted 242 cases individually, one by one.”

On July 30, hundreds of members of Rwandan and Congolese rebel groups occupied villages in the Walikale region of North Kivu, assaulting their victims in groups of two to six.

Countering reports from the area that some victims were male infants, Mr. Trombatore said that all were female and that the youngest was 16 years old and the oldest 75.

Thousands of women, and hundreds of men, have been sexually assaulted by the various armed groups warring in eastern Congo.

Officials with the aid group have said that the rebels — members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda and the Mai Mai — left the villages on Aug. 3, and that later that day a local administrator alerted aid organizations in the area to the mass rapes.

Rebels from the same groups were suspected of attacking workers with the International Medical Corps on Wednesday after the workers landed by helicopter in Walikale, forcing the aid workers to escape into the surrounding forest.

Mr. Trombatore said Thursday that all the aid workers had been rescued and were safe.

Since the United Nations first publicly reported the mass rapes on Aug. 22, questions have arisen over how much the United Nations knew about the attacks as they were under way.

United Nations officials have said the peacekeepers did not know about the rapes until Aug. 12.

But a leaked United Nations e-mail dated July 30 shows that officials there were aware that the rebels had taken over one of the villages and raped one woman within the first day of the attack. By Aug. 10, the United Nations was aware that at least 25 women had been raped, according to another United Nations bulletin, published online.

Mass animal extinction could mean a new geologic epoch
LiveScience.com
(9/2/10)

Mass Extinction Threat: Earth on Verge of Huge Reset Button?

Mass extinctions have served as huge reset buttons that dramatically changed the diversity of species found in oceans all over the world, according to a comprehensive study of fossil records. The findings suggest humans will live in a very different future if they drive animals to extinction, because the loss of each species can alter entire ecosystems.

Some scientists have speculated that effects of humans – from hunting to climate change – are fueling another great mass extinction. A few go so far as to say we are entering a new geologic epoch, leaving the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch behind and entering the Anthropocene Epoch, marked by major changes to global temperatures and ocean chemistry, increased sediment erosion, and changes in biology that range from altered flowering times to shifts in migration patterns of birds and mammals and potential die-offs of tiny organisms that support the entire marine food chain.

Scientists had once thought species diversity could help buffer a group of animals from such die-offs, either keeping them from heading toward extinction or helping them to bounce back. But having many diverse species also proved no guarantee of future success for any one group of animals, given that mass extinctions more or less wiped the slate clean, according to studies such as the latest one.

Is the first genetically altered animal heading for your dining table?
Reuters
(8/30/10)

Is genetically altered fish OK? U.S. to decide

U.S. health officials are set to rule on whether a faster-growing, genetically engineered fish is safe to eat in a decision that could deliver the first altered animal food to consumers’ dinner plates.

The fish, made by Aqua Bounty Technologies Inc, is manipulated to grow twice as fast as traditional Atlantic salmon, something the company says could boost the nation’s fish sector and reduce pressure on the environment.

But consumer advocates and food safety experts are worried that splicing and dicing fish genes may have the opposite effect, leading to more industrial farming and potential escapes into the wild. Side effects from eating such fish are also unknown, with little data to show it is safe, they say.

“They’re basically putting the fish on permanent growth hormone so it grows faster … so they can sell bigger fish faster,” said Jaydee Hanson, a policy analyst for the nonprofit Center for Food Safety.

It also raises questions about the industrialization of the nation’s food supply at a time when consumers — exasperated by massive egg and other food recalls — are growing increasingly concerned and seeking more locally produced meals.

The small Massachusetts-based biotechnology company is seeking Food and Drug Administration approval to sell its salmon, called AquAdvantage, to fish farmers nationwide.

If given the green light, the salmon could be followed by the company’s engineered trout and tilapia. Other scientists are also developing altered pigs and cows for food. The United States already allows genetically modified plants.

On Sept. 19, the FDA kicks off a three-day meeting to discuss whether to approve the salmon. Outside advisers will weigh available data and offer advice, although the FDA will later make the final call.