Cloned Livestock Is OK for Food, Says FDA
An FDA study says that milk and meat from cloned animals is safe for human consumption. The “final risk assessment,” which analyzes scientific research conducted over the course of several years, is not yet available to the public, but Rick Weiss of the Washington Post obtained an advance copy. The news breaks close on the heels of reports that the E.U.’s European Food Safety Authority released similar findings that food from cloned livestock is “very unlikely” to harm consumers.
At the moment, clones are rare animals. The Post indicates that there are 570 cloned cattle in the U.S., with 30 bovine offspring; there are 24 cloned dairy cows, and 5 pigs. It would be many years before farmers would consider slaughtering or milking clones themselves—their near-term value lies in cloning hearty animals for breeding purposes.
Some groups will argue that consumers might like to know if, in the future, they’re buying products derived from cloned animals. But Weiss reports that “FDA officials have said they do not expect to require food from clones to be labeled as such, but they may allow foods from ordinary animals to be labeled as not from clones.”
The strategy sounds counter-intuitive—labeling all livestock-derived products in a grocery store that are not made from cloned animals would presumably be more complicated and costly than just labeling everything that is derived from clones. But the proposal would serve the interest of producers because a “Made From Cloned Livestock” label could effectively serve as a black mark on food packaging. Organic food labeling provides an analogy. Producers are not required to indicate when they utilize environmentally hazardous chemical fertilizers and pesticides to produce food products. Rather, by following stringent regulations, they are allowed to label foods that are not produced with hazardous agents. Those products are “organic.”
UPDATE: The FDA has released the report: press release, full site; Weiss has more coverage of the negative reactions from consumer groups.
Image credit: flickr.com/sunfox
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