Source: John Strak, MEATINGPLACE.COM, 12/9/10

The board of the Food Standards Agency (FSA) in the United Kingdom met this week and changed its position on how the meat and produce from cloned animals should be addressed.

The FSA agreed to recommend to ministers that “there are no food safety grounds for regulating foods from the descendants of cloned cattle and pigs” and that “the FSA is minded to adopt the position taken by the European Commission and others, that food obtained from the descendants of clones of cattle and pigs does not require authorization under the novel foods regulation.”

Until this week the FSA required that the marketing of products harvested from cloned animals should be subject to authorization as “novel foods” in the UK, which required a complex licensing procedure and represented a departure from the rest of the European Union.

The FSA’s statement noted that the board members agreed that, “for food safety purposes, mandatory labelling of meat and milk obtained from the descendants of cloned cattle and pigs would be unnecessary and disproportionate, providing no significant food safety benefit to consumers.”

The proportion of cloned animals born in the UK and Europe every year is tiny. Estimates put it at less than 2 percent.
 

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