ViaGen in the News
The Right Decision on Cloned Livestock
Rocky Mountain News
December 29, 2006
The federal Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that meat and milk from certain cloned livestock and their offspring are as safe to eat as any other meat and milk, a welcome step toward allowing this developing technique to improve the nation’s food supply.
We’re sure the usual opponents of progress in the misnamed “consumer” movement will disagree, just as there are many people who protest the use of genetic engineering to improve crop yields. But they shouldn’t be able to impose their views on people who either don’t care one way or the other or actually believe it’s a good idea to move forward.
It won’t happen soon, anyway. The FDA will be asking for public comment until April 2, and may not make a final decision until the end of 2007. In the meantime, a voluntary moratorium that has been in place since 2003 will continue.
There are only a few hundred cloned domestic animals now, because they’re expensive to produce and because as long as the moratorium is in place, farmers can’t do anything productive with them. Unless the technology becomes much cheaper, there probably never will be a great many; they won’t be cloned directly for food, but as superior breeding animals, whose offspring will form herds managed in conventional ways.
So even after the moratorium is lifted, if it is, several years will pass before any significant amount of food derived indirectly from cloned animals will appear in stores or restaurants.
If the FDA decides to allow commercial use to proceed, it will also face a decision on whether to require labeling, and probably considerable pressure from certain quarters to do so. At present, it appears the agency is leaning against mandatory labeling, which is sensible. Tracking the origin of every animal in order to classify it as clone-free (or not) might well prove impractical, and would certainly be costly.
If there are no issues of public health or safety, such a requirement is unnecessary. What greater benefits would mandatory labeling offer compared with voluntary labeling? If there really is a public demand for clone-free meat and milk, no doubt specialized producers will emerge to meet the demand, even if the products are indistinguishable. They can label their products, but that doesn’t mean everybody should have to.
We expect, though, that once cloning is a commercial practice, people will get used to the idea. Then they’ll pay no more attention to whether an animal has a clone in its ancestry than they do now to whether it was conceived by artificial insemination, as about 90 percent of dairy cows are.
Did you even know that? And now that you do, do you care? The milk is the same.