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.
Having completed a year-long scientific review, the Food and Drug Administration is set to announce next week that meat and milk from cloned farm animals and their offspring can start appearing on supermarket shelves.
The decision would be a notable act of defiance against the US Congress, which last month passed appropriations legislation recommending that any such approval be delayed pending further studies. Moreover, the US 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 finalise 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 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.
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 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.
Clones are genetic replicas, typically made from a single skin cell of a desirable animal. A handful of US companies have pushed for marketing approval, saying the technology will make products from the tastiest beef cattle, leanest pigs and most generous milk producers more widely available to consumers.
Scientists largely agree that although some clones harbour genetic peculiarities of uncertain relevance, their sexually produced offspring are healthy and normal. Of particular concern was that even though the vast majority of clones die either before birth or soon after, those that survive are deemed normal. They say 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.
