It’s not often that American food companies join hands with
environmental and consumer activists to call for greater government
control over the nation’s food supply. But that’s just what
happened last week after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
concluded that meat and milk from cloned cows, pigs, and goats are
safe for consumers.
Despite the overwhelming science behind that finding, industry
and activists have called for a ban on cloned food products.
Naturally, you might think that lockstep agreement from such
unlikely bedfellows is a little fishy. And you’d be right. The
losers would be American consumers, farmers, and the
environment.
Since 1996, when Dolly the sheep became the first mammal to be
cloned from an adult cell, thousands of animal clones — including
other sheep as well as cows, goats, pigs, horses, rabbits, and
several other species — have been born and studied more intensely
than the progeny of almost any other animal breeding technique.
Critics claim the process will create monstrous new hybrids in some
kind of barnyard “Boys from Brazil,” but the reality is that
consumer safety is not seriously in doubt.
FDA took more than six years investigating the matter, and its
comprehensive, 968-page report shows that thousands of nutritional
and other compositional comparisons reveal no differences between
the safety of clones and conventionally bred animals. Stephen
Sundlof, head of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied
Nutrition said at a news conference last Tuesday that agency
scientists have “done a very extensive job of looking at anything
that could possibly be a food hazard, and to be honest, we found
nothing.”
Regulatory authorities in New Zealand, France, and the European
Union agree. And government scientists in Australia, Canada, and
Japan are expected to issue their own clean bills of health in the
next year or two.
THIS OVERWHELMING agreement among scientists should pave the way
for animal clones — or to be more exact, their offspring — to
come to market. Cloning is expensive, costing as much as $17,000
for cows and $4,000 for pigs. So, the vast majority of clones will
be used just for breeding. Only their naturally produced offspring
should find their way into grocery stores during the next few
decades.
Since there are no real questions about consumer safety, the
critics have had to capitalize on zany scare stories and the
public’s ambivalence about unfamiliar technologies. The Consumer
Federation of America (CFA) says that a “flood of milk from highly
productive cloned cows is not good for the taxpayers” who buy
surplus milk from dairy farmers. The group also claims cloning will
make our kids fat because “[s]urplus milk is turned into high fat
products that then go to school children.”
At one FDA meeting, CFA’s Carol Tucker Foreman even exploited
religious and ethical concerns, criticizing the agency for studying
food safety without first considering any ethical and religious
implications. Of course, FDA is not legally permitted to consider
religious objections, as the activists point out when the agency
evaluates controversial products they want approved.
More importantly, humans have been using sophisticated
scientific methods to control animal reproduction for decades, so
we have already settled the ethical arguments critics of animal
cloning now raise in opposition. Cloning is really just a
technological extension of methods such as in vitro fertilization
(IVF) and embryo transfer that are now commonplace in animal
breeding, though it uses one animal’s DNA to create an exact
genetic copy, essentially an identical twin born a generation
later.
While it has been just a decade since Dolly was born, most of
the individual steps that make cloning possible are a close to a
century old. The transfer of living embryos from one animal’s womb
to another, for example, dates to the 1800s. Cloning itself has
been conducted with invertebrates, amphibians, and other
non-mammalian animals since the turn of the 19th century. And IVF
was developed for animal breeding in the 1950s.
Even today’s proven method of cloning mammals — transferring an
adult animal’s genetic material to an unfertilized egg — was first
envisioned in the 1930s. Its use simply had to wait until these
intermediate steps were perfected over the following decades. As a
consequence, scientists know today far more about the health and
well-being of cloned animals than the skeptics would have us
believe.
None of the technical difficulties that cloning critics
highlight is unique. Many clonal pregnancies result in miscarriage,
and some clones have neonatal health problems, so critics insist
that moving forward now is inhumane and unethical.
Each of these problems is also present in other assisted
reproductive technologies, such as IVF and embryo transfer, as well
as natural mating. Animal breeders have managed them for decades,
so their presence in cloned animals presents no unique ethical or
consumer safety issues.
THE ABUNDANT evidence of safety is why the critics have had to
focus attention away from the science. Instead they ask, even if we
can clone animals safely, why should we?
The answer is simple: Breeders can produce better and safer food
by cloning rare animals that produce leaner meat, for example, or
are especially resistant to common livestock diseases. Researchers
in Asia have even cloned a cow that appears to be resistant to mad
cow disease. The ability to drastically reduce illness among
animals and to improve consumer safety arguably makes cloning more,
not less humane than traditional breeding.
But that’s not all. Producing more meat or milk per animal helps
reduce farming’s ecological footprint by, for example, allowing for
a reduction in the size of herds and lowering the amount of waste
the animals generate. And cloning is already being used to help
increase populations of threatened and endangered animals, such as
the gaur and banteng, which are related to our beef and dairy
cattle. Many scientists hope that, one day, cloning can help
recover endangered species such as tigers, rhinos, and pandas.
Still, the activists’ antics have scared one group of
influential Americans: the dairy and packaged food industries.
Rising demand in the U.S. for organic products makes many food
companies believe consumers will reject meat and milk from clones.
Others fear a trade backlash from technophobic consumers in places
like France and Italy. That’s why several major food companies,
including the largest U.S. meat producer Tyson Foods, have already
announced that they had “no immediate plans” to buy cloned
livestock.
THEY MAY NOT have the chance. Ever since 2001, animal cloners have
complied with a “voluntary” moratorium on selling food products
from clones while they awaited FDA’s safety study.
Yet, even as FDA unveiled its final assessment last week, the
U.S. Agriculture Department bowed to food industry pressure and
asked to extend the moratorium until consumer concerns could be
resolved - possibly as long as two or three more years. And
Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski introduced legislation that
would keep cloned animals off the market indefinitely.
Knowing that they are ultimately at the mercy of consumers and
retailers, Texas-based Viagen and Iowa-based TransOva Genetics —
two of three private sector U.S. cloning companies — developed a
system to track cloned animals so that farmers, meat packers, and
retailers who wish to do so can avoid them. John Kleiboeker, of the
Missouri Beef Industry Council told the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch that “the FDA may say it’s not required, but
consumers may want labels, so discerning marketers will do it.”
Kleiboeker is right, of course. From organic milk and fair trade
coffee to kosher and halal meats, many consumers have shown a
preference for foods produced in certain ways.
But, that is exactly why extending the moratorium is
unnecessary. American farmers and the food industry have proven
perfectly capable of segregating foods from various new and old
production systems whenever a genuine consumer demand for it
exists. Whether it’s religious, ethical, or environmental concerns,
all that is needed is for regulators to make a science-based
judgment on safety and then get out of the way.
