End Times and Current Events

THE Food Standards Agency (FSA) is changing its advice to Ministers on allowing meat and milk from the descendants of cloned cattle and pigs into the food chain.

If Ministers accept the advice, it could pave the way for the offspring of cloned animals to enter the UK food chain this year.

Last summer, the agency insisted meat from the offspring of cloned animals sold into the food chain by a Scottish farmer should have been authorised by FSA under EU novel foods rules and was therefore’ illegal’.

But yesterday, (Wednesday, May 25), the FSA board accepted the recommendations of a paper presented to it which stated: “FSA is minded to adopt the position taken by the European Commission and others, that food obtained from the descendants of clones of cattle and pigs does not require authorisation under the novel foods regulation.”

The FSA board changed its viewpoint at the end of last year. The decision was based on evidence and advice from the European Food Safety Authority and the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes that ‘there are no food safety grounds for regulating foods from the descendants of cloned cattle and pigs’.

The agency then issued a consultation on changing its advice to Ministers before confirming its new stance at Wednesday’s board meeting in Belfast.

This conclusion applies specifically to the use of cloning for cattle and pigs because the use of cloning technology in other food-producing animals is currently ‘limited’.

The FSA is stressing, however, that cloned cattle and pigs are still within the scope of the legislation and any foods from them would therefore require pre-market authorisation by the agency before being sold into the food chain.

Farming Minister Jim Paice has indicated the Government is unlikely to require labelling of meat and milk from cloned animals.

In December, he told the EFRA committee of MPs that while the Government recognised consumer power, consumer information and the right to choose, it is not possible to detect whether meat and milk is from a cloned animal. It is therefore impossible for mandatory labelling to be implemented effectively, he said.

http://www.farmersguardian.com/home/latest-news/fsa-to-allow-cloned-offspring-into-food-chain/39233.article