Once again, the public are left in the dark over clone risks

MEAT from the offspring of a cloned cow was eaten in the UK last year and this year, says the Food Standards Agency. Two bulls from the embryos of a cow cloned in the US were bought by a farmer in Scotland, and meat from one was sold on to consumers. Last night another similar bull was found to have also been illegally sold for meat in May.

The farmer concerned says the animal had been authorised to enter the food chain. The FSA, the body empowered to sanction any so-called "novel" or new food before it can be produced and sold to consumers, says it has had no such request, nor given any authorisation.

While the authorities say that consuming products from healthy clones (a clone being a genetic copy, similar to identical twins but born at different times – in this case a cow which is a copy of its mother) and their offspring poses no known safety risk, such meat and other products are considered to be "novel" foods (like genetically modified crops) and therefore need to be assessed against strict criteria before being placed on the market.

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The FSA is also investigating a report that milk from the offspring of a cloned cow has been sold in the UK without being labelled as such. The Agency has said that it does not know how many embryos from cloned animals may have been imported to Britain, but Tim Smith, chief executive of the FSA, has tried to calm the growing storm around him by stressing that there are no health risks associated with eating meat or drinking milk from descendants of cloned cows.

Some of the UK's leading scientists agree that meat and milk from cows pose no health threat to humans, but do acknowledge very real concerns around the ethics and animal welfare aspects of cloning.

Proponents of cloning say it offers the potential to produce large numbers of high quality animals; opponents say techniques used are intrusive and cruel to animals, many die or are deformed in the process, and the cows created have shorter lives.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of cloning techniques, the current (rather blurred) state of regulation and its policing, and arguments around the economics of using a breeding technique which many say is inefficient, expensive and ethically questionable, who has actually asked the public if it wants to buy foodstuffs produced using such methods?

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For many people, the possibility that meat or milk derived from cloned animals might one day be authorised for introduction into the food chain has come to light for the first time through these two episodes where such foodstuffs have apparently slipped through the regulatory net.

"To be honest, the FSA's penalty of 5,000 to anyone who fails to inform it and seek authorisation for the production of foodstuffs derived from cloned animals is not much," says Emma Hockridge of the Soil Association. "As part of research carried out in 2008, the FSA did ask members of the public how they felt about cloning and food, and the vast majority said they felt uneasy about it. Most said they felt it was a quantum leap between giving Mother Nature a helping hand, as in artificial insemination or selective breeding, and interfering with Mother Nature." FoE would like to see tighter legislation and much stiffer penalties for contravention.

"The use of cloned farm animals undermines the freedom of choice of farmers and consumers to avoid these animals and products, because of a lack of transparency in their regulation and traceability. At a time when the Government is expressing a desire to move towards 'honest labelling' of food so consumers understand what they are buying and know its provenance, cloned animals entering the food chain must be tackled with the utmost urgency."

Three weeks ago, the European Parliament voted for an immediate

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moratorium on clones in the food chain until legislation expressly prohibiting foods from cloned animals and their offspring can be put in place. Objectors say that, despite some scientists' arguments that there are is no known harm, there is little information on the long-term effects on human health of the use of such foods.

"Even if they were not bothered about the techniques and science, a lot of people would object to the ethics around cloning," says Pete Riley of the GM Freeze, a broad-cased coalition against genetic

manipulation. "The public are, as usual, the last to know what's going on. There should be widespread consultation and debate about cloning and then the public has a say."

"There should also be a moratorium pending a lot more investigation into whether people want food produced using techniques which push animals to the limit of their metabolism, increases their

susceptibility to certain disease and gives animals from a smaller and smaller gene pool when we should be widening that gene pool."