This is an important period in the regulation and sale of food from clones and their offspring in the UK and the EU. The EU and UK Government are considering the whole question of cloning and whether to allow commercial cloning to go ahead in Europe.

Yet food from the offspring of clones has already entered the food chain due to the lack of regulation and monitoring by the UK Food Standards Agency. More could follow unless a ban is put in place, as voted for by the European Parliament last July.

Commercial cloning is growing in the US, mostly in high-performance dairy cattle and pigs. Already embryos produced from cloned dairy cattle have been imported in the UK and calves born as a result. Meat from at least one of these clone offspring was sold as food, and more could follow unless tighter controls are introduced to ban cloning and the import of cloned animals, embryos and semen and their products. A number of dairy calves were born from the same cloned breeding stock that could produce milk for the food chain in the immediate future (for more details on cloning see Update on Cloning of Animals for Food Production).

In recent months the Food Standards Agency (FSA) has changed its position on whether food from clone offspring requires approval under the Novel Foods Regulations. They now considered that no such approval is required on food safety grounds, despite considerable scientific uncertainty and lack of data. They accept that products from the cloned animals themselves would require approval because they are not the product of “traditional breeding” (although this is unlikely to happen because of their high value). The offspring of clones are produced by the normal method of reproduction – fertilising an egg with sperm – although mainly using artificial insemination. Thus the FSA now argue that cloned offspring are the production of “traditional breeding” and won’t be required to obtain novel food approval before meat and milk produced from them can be sold.

Cloning raises ethical and moral issues well beyond conventional risk assessments. Cloning has a very poor success rate, many embryos and young animals die as a result of genetic changes occurring during the procedure, and this causes severe suffering and health problems for surrogate mothers (eg, large calves mean Caesarian sections are common) and the cloned claves. The FSA and European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) argue that the genetic changes are corrected in the next generation and there is no evidence that there would be a risk to health to people consuming products from these animals.

However the EFSA has admitted that the food safety assessment of cloned offspring is based on a small set of data, and there is limited evidence to show if the genetic disruption caused by cloning cannot result in unexpected change in milk or meat which could be harmful. Adverse effects on human health arising from cloning cannot yet be ruled out because data on products from clones and their offspring is too limited.

Furthermore, cloning is a continuation of selective breeding programmes that themselves have resulted in serious health and welfare problems in livestock and poultry breeds used in intensive systems.

At present the UK Government is supportive of cloning to the point at they do not even want the food products from the offspring of cloned to be labelled so that the public can make an informed choice. Politicians in the EU are more sceptical, and the European Parliament voted in July 2010 and for a moratorium on cloning and imports while the legislative framework for a ban is agreed.

GM Freeze believes there is no place for cloning in the UK or EU, and there are very good reasons to ban the practice of cloning, as well as imports of clones, cloned embryos and semen and their food products across the whole of the EU. Short of this ban, the precautionary principle requires all products of cloned animals to go through a full safety assessment as required under the Novel Food Regulations. This should be allied to policy changes to shift livestock and poultry production to an extensive sustainable model based on agroecological principles.