FDA Declares Food Products From Cloned Animals Safe

Jan 16, 11:25 AM

After years of debate, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday declared that food from cloned animals and their progeny is safe to eat, clearing the way for milk and meat derived from copies of prized dairy cows, steers and hogs to be sold at the grocery store.

The decision was hailed by cloning companies and some farmers, who have been pushing for government approval in hopes of turning cloning into a routine agricultural tool. Because clones are costly, they will be used primarily for breeding, not for producing milk, hamburgers and pork chops.

"This is a huge milestone," said Mark Walton, president of ViaGen, a leading livestock cloning company in Austin, Texas.

Farmers had long observed a voluntary moratorium on the sale of clones and their offspring into the food supply. The FDA on Tuesday effectively lifted that for clone offspring. But another government agency, the Agriculture Department, asked farmers to continue withholding clones themselves from the food supply, saying the department wanted time to allay concerns among retailers and overseas trading partners.

Meat giant Smithfield Foods Inc. repeated its previous pledge that it has no plans to sell products from cloned animals. Because the technology is still new, the company said in a statement, it will continue to watch cloning research.

"We are committed to maintaining our focus on the development and improvement of our meat products through careful selective breeding and genetic research," Smithfield's statement read.

The world's largest pork producer and processor maintains ties to ViaGen. Smithfield entered into an agreement in 2000 with ProLinia Inc., a biotechnology company that ViaGen later acquired, to provide genetic material for a cloning project. ViaGen's executives have described Smithfield as a minority shareholder.

Animal breeding takes time, so even with Tuesday's actions, it is likely to be several years before products from the offspring of clones are available at the grocery store in appreciable quantity.

While acknowledging that consumer acceptance remains a hurdle, proponents of cloning technology say it could have a major impact on the livestock industry by providing meat and milk that is better and more consistent.

"When you buy a box of Cheerios in New York and one in Champaign, Ill., you know they are going to be the same," said Jon Fisher, president and owner of Prairie State Semen in Illinois. "By shortening the genetic pool using clones, you can do a similar thing."

"It could improve the quality of meat in the supermarket," Fisher added. "It depends if customers allow it."

Consumer groups immediately lambasted the FDA's report, saying that the science remains inadequate and that many consumers oppose cloning for religious or ethical reasons. Some members of Congress had sought to delay a decision until further studies were completed.

"It flies in the face of Congress' wishes. It flies in the face of consumer wishes," said Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumers Union, the advocacy group that publishes Consumer Reports.

But Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, said food from cloned animals was "indistinguishable" from that of conventionally bred animals.

"It is beyond our imagination to even have a theory for why the food is unsafe," he said.

The FDA's approval extends to cloned cows, pigs and goats but not other farm animals such as sheep; the agency cited insufficient data on cloned sheep. The FDA said meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring would not be labeled because it was the same as conventional food and did not pose a safety risk.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., however, has introduced legislation to require labels on cloned products, and consumer groups suggested that labeling would be a battleground in the near future.

The FDA's announcement Tuesday came with an asterisk, given the Agriculture Department's request for a continued moratorium on the sale of clones into the food supply. That request is likely to have little effect, since producers are not looking to sell clones; each still costs thousands of dollars. But it could force a few owners of dairy clones to dispose of milk from the animals rather than sell it.

It remains to be seen how widely the technology will be adopted. Interest from the food industry has been tepid.

This story was compiled from reports by The New York Times and Pilot staff writer Carolyn Shapiro.

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Smithfield Foods Inc. repeated its pledge that it has no plans to sell products from cloned animals. how cloning works

Scientists take an immature egg, usually from a cow that went to the slaughterhouse, and remove the nucleus. They add DNA from a donor cow, often taken from the skin cell of an ear, and a tiny electric shock coaxes the egg to start dividing and grow into a copy of the original animal. The egg is then implanted into a surrogate animal for gestation and birth.

(c) 2008 Virginian - Pilot. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved. FDA Declares Food Products From Cloned Animals Safe
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