Cloned meat, milk closer to market
WASHINGTON – Having completed a years-long scientific review, the Food and Drug Administration is set to announce as early as next week that meat and milk from cloned farm animals and their offspring can start appearing on supermarket shelves, sources in contact with the agency said Friday.
The decision would be a notable act of defiance against Congress, which last month passed appropriations legislation recommending that any such approval be delayed pending further studies. Moreover, the Senate version of the farm bill, yet to be reconciled with the House version, contains stronger, binding language that would block FDA action on cloned food, probably for years.
With a conference committee poised to finalize the farm bill in the next few weeks, that left the FDA a potentially narrow time frame within which to act if it wanted to settle the issue in sync with America’s major meat trading partners.
New Zealand and Australia have released reports concluding that meat and milk from clones are safe. Canada and Argentina are reportedly close to doing the same.
And although European consumers are generally uncomfortable with agricultural biotechnology, the European Union’s food safety agency is expected to endorse the safety of meat and milk from clones in a draft statement that could be released within the next week.
“The science seems to be leading them and us to the same conclusion,” said a U.S. trade official, speaking on condition of anonymity because U.S. policy is technically still under review.
The FDA has hinted strongly in the past year that it was ready to lift its “voluntary moratorium” on the marketing of milk and meat from clones and their offspring. Multiple studies compiled by the agency have shown that the chemical composition of those products is virtually identical to that of milk and meat from conventionally bred animals. And studies in which rodents were fed food from clones have found no evidence of health effects.
But public opinion has been negative on the issue, with some saying that not enough safety studies have been conducted and others concerned about the health of the clones, which are far more likely than ordinary farm animals to die early in life.
As of Friday, the FDA would neither confirm nor deny that it was close to releasing its so-called final risk assessment. Spokeswoman Julie Zawisza said the agency had received a lot of feedback – about 30,500 comments – on its draft risk assessment, released in December 2006. That document found no “food consumption risks or subtle hazards” associated with meat or milk from clones or their offspring.
The agency has not revealed how many comments were in favor or opposed.
Margaret Mellon of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group, said she had read the entire 678-page draft risk assessment and found it to be “long on assumptions and short on data, and especially short on the data that are directly relevant to food consumption safety.”
Of particular concern, she said, was that even though the vast majority of clones die either before birth or soon after, those that survive are deemed normal. She said the FDA should withhold approval at least until it has a regulatory plan in place that will give it an ability to track food from clones and watch for human health impacts.
Others have called for mandatory labeling so consumers can avoid products from clones.
The FDA has said that lacking any safety concerns, it will not demand such labels. But last month, the two largest U.S. farm animal cloners, ViaGen and Trans Ova Genetics of Sioux Center, Iowa, announced a voluntary plan under which cloned animals would be registered and segregated from the conventional meat processing streams. If accepted by regulators, it could allow some food distributors to label their products as “clone free.”