Europe to Secretly Force Cloned Food on Consumers

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Monique Goyens, the director general for the European consumer group, BEUC, has warned UK consumers that milk and meat from cloned animals’ offspring could soon be on sale in Britain without any warning labels.

Mail Online reports the European Commission is threatening to force through the change with the backing of the British Government.

BEUC is a European Consumers’ Organization with a membership of 44 independent national consumer organizations from 31 European countries. The organization acts as an umbrella group in Brussels for the organizations they represent. Their main task is to defend the interests of all Europe’s consumers.

The European Commission represents EU interests, proposes legislation to Parliament and the Council, administers EU policies, enforces EU law, and negotiates internationally.

The Commission contends a ban on food from cloned offspring risks triggering a trade war with the U.S., where most cloning of food animals currently takes place; the Commission claims that “since the U.S. does not have an official tracing system to identify which animals are the offspring of clones, it would be impossible to label the resulting food”.

The Commission’s proposals have the backing of Caroline Spelman, UK Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, just like non-labeled GMO and cloned foods have government backing from the USDA and FDA.

BEUC’s director general Goyens says, “It is unacceptable that the EU will have to allow milk or meat from the offspring of cloned animals without any labeling just because the U.S. and other exporting countries have no traceability system in place.”

Last year, the European Parliament voted in favor of a blanket ban on the sale of foods from cloned animals and their offspring.

“Although no safety concerns have been identified so far with meat produced from cloned animals, this technique raises serious issues about animal welfare, reduction of biodiversity, as well as ethical concerns,” said Corinne Lepage, a French member of the European Parliament.

As Mail Online’s Sean Poulter notes, research shows an overwhelming majority of EU consumers do not want cloning to be used for food production purposes. Some 84 per cent are concerned about the long-term health and safety effects.

According to a 2008 European Food Safety Authority report, animals involved in cloning suffer pain and ill-health linked to miscarriages, organ defects and gigantism. Cloned animals can be so large that they have to be cut from their surrogate mothers via caesarean section.

It’s illegal to sell meat or milk from clone animals or their offspring in the UK, but over three years ago, with scant media coverage, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved as safe for consumption, meat and milk from cloned animals.

The USDA placed a moratorium on clones, but not their offspring. And no special “clone” label is required on products from clones or the cloned offspring.

EU Cloning in Stealth

European vendors have been operating in stealth, so meat and dairy products are believed to already be on supermarket shelves.

The Swiss Federal Office of Public Health confessed the country uses dairy products and meat derived from cloned animals that have been sold in Switzerland. And the Swiss government admits several hundred cattle that are second or third generation descendants of clones are in the country.

As NYT’s James Kanter notes, some of the biggest cattle genetics companies and cooperatives in the world — including Alta Genetics, CRV, Genus and Viking Genetics — are European-owned.

The Daily Mail reported last year that more than 100 cows descended from cloned cattle have been born on British farms causing alarm about their secret spread into the food system.

One British dairy farmer confessed using milk from a cow bred from a clone as part of his daily production, and was selling embryos from the same cow to breeders in Canada.

Mail Online’s Sean Poulter writes: The number of clone farm cows that are in Britain highlights how food production is being irrevocably changed without public debate or effective policing. As each generation matures, breeds and produces its own milk, so it will become impossible to avoid those foods which have a clone farm background.

U.S. Cloning Cattle From Dead Cows

In the US, cloned cattle have been created from the cells of dead animals. The JR Simplot company in Idaho is among many that use the dead animal cloning technique.

The company claims the goal of livestock cloning is to clone the best animals to produce the best beef, and that’s why they use the cells taken from the carcasses of dead animals.

“The animals are hanging on a rail ready to go to the meat counter,” said Hicks, working for JR Simplot. “We identify carcasses that have certain carcass characteristics that we want, but it’s too late to reproduce the genetics of the animal. But through cloning we can resurrect that animal.”

The “resurrected” animals are then bred with naturally born cows.

Scott Simplot, the head of the JR Simplot company, says European farmers will fall behind the rest of the world unless they are allowed to use such techniques to improve the productivity of their livestock.

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