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Big oops. Meat and milk from the offspring of cloned animals has entered the UK food chain. Cue scary headlines and scared consumers. But the leviathan of EU-lawmaking means no-one actually knows if it’s legal or not. And that’s an even bigger oops.
No-one can really blame UK consumers if they are sniffing their milk and beef sandwiches suspiciously this summer.
After all, despite reassurances from health experts that produce from the offspring of clones animals is safe, and a positive food safety opinion from EFSA, the current hoo-ha is happening in a country where, in 1990, a small child was fed a burger on live TV just so her agriculture minister father could show the nation how sure he was she wouldn’t get BSE from it.
Safety is crucial, but so is the horned question of whether or not clones or their offspring can legally enter the food chain. And right now it’s about as clear as cow pat – not least for the Food Standards Agency, which has been rounded on by legal beagles after categorically stating they cannot.
A new kind of buy-one-get-one-free
The trouble with cloning is that when the original novel foods regulation was worked out in 1997, few people thought the marketing tactic of ‘buy-one-get-one-free’ could, one day, extend to whole animals. It applies to “foods and food ingredients consisting of or isolated from plants and food ingredients isolated from animals, except for foods and food ingredients obtained by traditional propagating or breeding practices and having a history of safe food use”.
This might imply cloned foods are included, but whether or not that implication is sufficient is confusing even for people who are up close and personal with bovine breeding habits. (Your writer is not, and has no immediate plans to extend her professional experience in that direction).
If this does implicitly include produce from clones’ offspring, then the FSA should have been consulted. It was not, so it seems clones slipped through on its watch – another oops for the agency that’s just been carved up by the Conservative coalition government.
If it doesn’t? Well, there are no rules so it’s legal by default. Right?
The European Commission has already recognised the need for clarity. Biotechnology is not the same game as it was in 1997. Aside from animal cloning becoming a very real proposition, huge strides have been made in genetic modification of crops – and much very tiny progress with nanoparticles.
This, among other reasons, is why novel foods is undergoing a revamp. Trouble is, Brussels law-making takes years, and the Council and the Parliament are currently on different sides of the cattle grid.
MEPs reject the idea that produce from clones or their offspring should be bundled under novel foods, arguing that the ethical aspects, as well as lack of long-term safety info, mean they merit their own special law.
The Council, on the other hand, wants cloning herded into the existing novel foods structure for now, subject to a review a year or so down the line.
Last week’s events mean the game of ping-pong being played back and forth between the Brussels institutions cannot continue. New technology is outpacing the law-making mechanisms, and the two sides need to get together to take swift, decisive interim action.
The clones – or at least the farmers raising them – will not wait.
To let the matter drift is to risk trampling consumer confidence in the food chain – confidence that the FSA and other food safety bodies across Europe have worked hard to rebuild over the last decade.
Let’s not forget that Europe’s admirable food safety mechanisms were put in place in the wake of BSE and other catastrophic food scares. Neither they, nor industry, nor consumers, can afford to let another crisis bring them into disrepute because no-one could decide where the legal boundaries lie.
Jess Halliday is senior editor of FoodNavigator.com. Over the past twelve years she has worked in print, broadcast and online media in both Europe and the United States.
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5 comments (Comments are now closed)
Corrections
Sorry, Mr Camp, scrapie has been around for years, long before MAFF made that feeding mistake. we used to call it Gid.
A cloned cow starts at the age of the cell it is made from. So when she starts milking she may be virtually ten years old. What effect this may have on cell counts, we do not know. It would seem that the Press has not picked this up yet.
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Posted by Bob Salmon
10 August 2010 | 10h51
Pandora's box
Probably for the moment can be safe. We just don't know about all the implications (in long terms thinking) . The wonder of the nature become from its capability to keep diversity (from genetical point of view). If we accept the ideea of cloning, we will accelerate the process of genom limitation (already started by selections) and, in years, we can face a lots of problems: related disease, new studies regarding the by-products, etc . And were will be the backup plan?
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Posted by Alin Barbatu
10 August 2010 | 06h50
Safety first
Mr. Camp has it backwards, at least as far as the U.S. FDA's study and risk assessment processes go regarding the safety of any product. In the case of cloning, companies submitted research, but FDA actually took cloned young animals, raised them, bred them and then studied the meat therefrom to detect any anomalies, dangers, etc. The companies had no say in how this research was done, the outcome of the research or FDA's analysis and reporting of the results. Included in this analysis was a global scientific literature search, including parochial studies conducted by several foreign governments, as well as consultations with scientists around the planet. The goal was to proof safety, not that a product is "unsafe." Also, cloning technology is not all that new. The technology has been around for nearly 30 years.
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Posted by Steve Kopperud
09 August 2010 | 17h15
Cloning Is it safe?
The answer here is we just don't know and it may take years to find out. At one time before a company and or food scientist had to prove something was safe before it was allowed in the markets to be consumed by people. Today it has to be proved as unsafe before it is disallowed prime example-- such as feeding proteins derived from cattle, sheep, goats etc back to these same animals in their feed which led directly to Scrappies in sheep, bovine spongiform encephalopathy etc. For safety in my humble opinion we need to switch back to the former where things had to be proven safe before they are allowed.
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Posted by danny camp
09 August 2010 | 15h16
Everyone needs to take a deep breath
The lack of yet another regulatory regimen to deal with meat from animals which is no different from that harvested from animals which were bred through in vitro fertilization or other assisted reproductive techniques, is not the stuff of mass panic and dithering in the streets. Consumers need only look at the number of food safety risk assessments done -- the US's FDA, EFSA, Japan, New Zealand, France, South America, and on and on -- all of which have determined sthere is no material or even minor difference in the safety of meat from animals cloned or the offspring thereof. There is NO genetic manipulation involved in cloning, you effectively have genetic twins separated in time. As to "ethical considerations," I'm at a loss to know how there is any more ethical consideration of livestock cloning needed than there is the use of any and all assisted reproductive technologies in agriculture or embryo transfer or IVF in humans. This whole situation is best understood by remembering three points: Cloning does not involve the addition, deletion or manipulation of genetic material, and the offspring of clones are not clones since they're bred and born as any other food animal. And most importantly, there is absolutely no safety issue. It's time to take a deep breath. There's nothing of which to be afraid.
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Posted by Steve Kopperud
09 August 2010 | 14h39
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