FDA approves use of cloned animals for food

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of meat and milk from cloned cattle, pigs, and goats and from the offspring of clones of any species traditionally used as food. It said that such meat and milk was “as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals.”

The FDA said that its conclusions agreed with those of a report from the National Academy of Sciences in 2002 and had been peer reviewed by independent scientific experts in cloning and animal health.

There was “insufficient information . . . to reach a conclusion on the safety of food from clones of other animal species, such as sheep,” the FDA said, and it recommended that food from clones of animals other than cattle, pigs, and goats was not introduced into the food supply.

“The US Department of Agriculture will convene stakeholders to discuss efforts to provide a smooth and orderly market transition, as industry determines next steps with respect to the existing voluntary moratorium,” the FDA said.

The agriculture department said that it “has encouraged technology providers to maintain their voluntary moratorium on sending milk and meat from animal clones into the food supply during this transition time.”

Despite the FDA approval in principle of meat from cloned cattle, pigs, and goats, in practice, clones are not expected to enter the food supply, the FDA said. They are rare and expensive, and the US agriculture department estimates that most of about 600 cloned animals in the United States are used for breeding. Their offspring, however, produced through ordinary sexual reproduction, are likely to be used for meat and milk.

The two largest US cloning companies said they would keep a register of all their cloned animals so that food companies can identify them when they enter the food chain, according to the Environment News Service (www.ens-newswire.com, 20 Dec 2007, “Cloned animals to be tracked for food processors.”)

The agriculture department said that cloning was “another breeding technique” and compared it with “other assisted reproductive technologies such as artificial insemination, embryo transfer, and in vitro fertilisation used to produce superior animals for milk, meat, or breeding purposes.”

The FDA released documents outlining the agency’s approach—a risk assessment, a risk management plan, and guidance for industry. Drafts of these documents were released in December 2006, and since then the risk assessment has been updated to include new scientific information that reinforces food safety conclusions, the agency said.

No special labelling will be required on meat or milk from cloned animals or their offspring “because food derived from these sources is no different from food derived from conventionally bred animals. Should a producer express a desire for voluntary labelling (for example, ‘this product is clone-free’), it will be considered on a case by case basis to ensure compliance with statutory requirements that labelling be truthful and not misleading,” the FDA said.

Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a blog that “Food is about emotion . . . The food industry is not going to like the emotions surrounding cloning” (http://blog.bioethics.net/2008/01/art-caplan-on-food-from-cloned-animals). He said that US consumers were wary of cloning, in part because of films presenting clones as monsters, which had made them “forget that cloning is nothing more than artificially creating twins . . . every drop of wine we drink comes from cloned grapes.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists, the Consumers Union, the Consumer Federation of America, the Democratic party senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, and animal rights groups condemned the FDA’s decision, which was made after it had received more than 30 000 comments from the public.

Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, said that the FDA had failed to take into account the animal welfare implications of cloning—high rates of mortality and birth defects and diseases in cloned animals. He also said that “the meat and dairy industries haven’t even been clamouring for cloning opportunities . . . It’s been venture biotech companies and their allies in the for profit branch of academia that have been doing harm to animals and developing clones as the latest new money making scheme.”