Cloned Food Issue
Animal Cloning: Questions and Answers
Q: Hasn’t cloning been around for a long time?
A: Cloning for food production is a wholly new technology, with many unknowns. Cloning techniques used for fruit trees or lesser animals have nothing in common with the mammal cloning that biotechnology companies want to use to produce experimental foods. The first mammal was cloned just ten years ago, and leading cloning scientists say that we have little evidence to show that clones can be produced safely, humanely, and without jeopardizing the safety of the food supply.
Q: Won’t cloning produce cheaper milk and better meat?
A: There is little evidence that cloning will lead to improved products for consumers. Milk and meat prices are already at historic lows, and food safety, not quality, is the biggest issue for meat producers. Cloning will only add to food safety concerns, while offering no benefit to consumers.
Q: What’s wrong with animal cloning for food production?
A: Animal cloning brings food safety, animal welfare, and other issues to livestock production. There is little evidence that clones can be safely used for milk or meat, and no long-term studies have been done on cloning for food. Conversely, there is overwhelming evidence that cloning is cruel to animals and will increase animal cruelty in agriculture. Finally, recent surveys show that most Americans object to animal cloning on moral or ethical grounds, suggesting that we need a broad public conversation before going ahead with foods from these experimental animals.
Q: What are the food safety concerns with animal cloning?
A: The health defects that are common in clones could impact food safety. Even small imbalances in a clone’s protein, fat, or hormone levels could create safety problems with the animal’s milk or meat. Scientists have also warned that health problems in clones could lead to an increase in the incidence of food-borne illnesses, such as E. coli infections. Also, since animal clones are almost always unhealthy at birth, they are usually treated with high doses of antibiotics and other medications. This suggests that cloning could increase residues of veterinary drugs in milk and meat, yet FDA has completely failed to address this concern.
Q: Why is cloning cruel to animals?
A: In most trials, over 90% of cloning attempts fail. In many cases, pregnancies are difficult and surrogate (host) mothers are treated with high doses of hormones and subjected to painful births. Clones are often born with hideous and painful defects. Common defects and health problems in clones include enlarged tongues; squashed faces; intestinal blockages; diabetes; shortened tendons; deformed feet; weakened immune systems; dysfunctional hearts, brains, livers, and kidneys; respiratory distress; and circulatory problems.
Q: Cloning can produce defective animals, but isn’t that true for other reproductive technologies (like in vitro fertilization)?
A: Other reproductive technologies sometimes result in defects, but the rate of failures and defects in cloning is astronomical, and will cause unprecedented animal suffering. Moreover, unlike any other technology, many scientists believe that cloning inherently produces defective animals.
Q: FDA says that defective clones will be removed from the food supply.
A: Scientists say that even healthy-appearing clones can have hidden defects that could impact food safety. They also say that there is no way to determine which clones may have such defects.
Q: Cloning is so expensive, so won’t most clones be used for breeding, not for food?
A: In dairy production, animals are used for both breeding and milk production, so milk is likely to be the first food product from clones. But even meat may come from clones. Once they outlive their usefulness as breeders, most animals are sold for slaughter. FDA has not developed any rules to prohibit the use of clones in meat production.
Center for Food Safety Video
In a very-short-film effort that could either be funny or scary, depending on your tastes, the Center for Food Safety has made a 40-second long video showing how it feels about cloned food.
You can view the video at YouTube.com by clicking here.
Not unsurpsingly, as the article below shows, the goverments and many industry groups will oppose efforts to require labeling of cloned foods, but at least some individual food companies seem to want to keep clones away from the consumers.
Cloned food may prompt ‘clone-free’ labels
Don't be surprised if companies try to distance themselves from controversy
Associated Press
Dec. 28, 2006
Meat and milk from cloned animals may not appear in supermarkets for years despite being deemed by the government as safe to eat. But don’t be surprised if “clone-free” labels appear sooner.
Ben & Jerry’s, for one, wants consumers to know that its ice cream comes from regular cows and not clones. The Ben & Jerry’s label already says its farmers don’t use bovine growth hormone.
“We want to make sure people are confident with what’s in our pints,” company spokesman Rob Michalak said. “We haven’t yet landed on exactly how we want to express that publicly.”
For food that does come from clones, the Food and Drug Administration is unlikely to require labels, officials said.
The FDA gave preliminary approval Thursday to meat and milk from cloned animals or their offspring. Federal scientists found virtually no difference between food from clones and food from conventional livestock.
The government believes “meat and milk from cattle, swine and goat clones is as safe to eat as the food we eat every day,” said Stephen F. Sundlof, director of the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine. Meat and milk from the offspring of clones is also safe, the agency concluded.
If food from clones is indistinguishable, FDA doesn’t have the authority to require labels, Sundlof said.
Companies trying to distance themselves from cloning must be careful with their wording, he added.
“If the statement implies that that particular product might be safer than another product, FDA would not allow that,” Sundlof said. “But there may be room for providing a contextual statement that is truthful and not misleading.”A dairy industry group said it’s too early to use clone-free labels. The FDA is at least a year away from finalizing approval of food from clones.
“It really may be somewhat premature to be talking about a label when FDA said meat and milk won’t be in the food supply in the foreseeable future,” said Susan Ruland, spokeswoman for the International Dairy Foods Association.
She added that cloning is new and, so far, rarely used, while growth hormones have been in widespread use for more than a decade.
Worried about consumer reaction
With members such as Kraft and Dannon, the association represents an industry worried about consumer reaction to cloning.
Surveys have shown most are uncomfortable with the idea of cloned livestock. Industry research shows overall sales could drop 15 percent once clones are allowed in the food supply.
“You hear a lot from the technology companies this week that this is a great technology — we’re not hearing that yet from the people who would actually use it and the people who would sell the product,” Ruland said.
For now, farmers and cloning companies are abiding by a voluntary ban on meat and milk from clones. The FDA said the informal ban would remain until its decision is final.
Critics want the final decision to include labels for food from clones.
“When they deny us mandatory labels, they don’t just deny us the right to choose,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety.
“They also deny our health professionals the ability to trace potential toxic or allergic reactions to this food,” Kimbrell said. “It’s bad enough they’re making us guinea pigs. But when we have health effects, we won’t be able to trace it.”
In Congress, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who heads a key agriculture spending subcommittee, said lawmakers should consider whether disclosure and labeling are appropriate for food from clones.
Jim Greenwood, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, said labeling meat from a clone would be as absurd as telling consumers that a steak was produced through artificial insemination, or by cows actually mating.
Information not 'useful'
“None of that information would be useful to consumers,” Greenwood said.
Federal scientists studied reams of data on the composition of meat and milk from clones and those of conventionally bred animals.
“You can’t tell them apart,” said L. Val Giddings, a vice president of BIO and a former Agriculture Department geneticist. “There is not an analytical, scientific test you can use to tell one from another. You just can’t do it.”
The cloning industry says the technology is latest in a series of reproductive tools for farmers and ranchers to help deliver the food consumers want. To produce a clone, the nucleus of a donor egg is removed and replaced with the DNA of a cow, pig or other animal. A tiny electric shock coaxes the egg to grow into a copy of the original animal.
Cloning companies say the technology would be used primarily for breeding and not for steak or pork tenderloin. Thus, consumers would mostly get food from their offspring and not from the clones themselves.
Still, some clones would eventually end up in the food supply. As with conventional livestock, a cloned bull or cow that outlived its usefulness would probably wind up at a hamburger plant, and a cloned dairy cow would be milked during her breeding years.
Although there are many scientists who share our concern about cloned food, there are also those who dismiss consumer concerns such as yours as mere ignorance and see no problem running headlong into cloned food without adequate research, as the article below illustrates.
Wary Consumers Eye Meat, Milk From Cloned Animals
From: www.redorbit.com
WALNUT CREEK, Calif. -- When the farming industry embraced artificial insemination during the 1940s, some critics argued that it would lead to animal abnormalities or destroy breeding businesses. Others proclaimed it tantamount to playing God.
Such objections have long since faded away, at least beyond the fringes, and the technology now is used to produce about three-quarters of all dairy cattle. To supporters of the Food and Drug Administration's preliminary approval of food from most clones and their offspring, a December announcement that sparked wide and vehement protests, the history of artificial insemination (AI) is telling.
"The information age changes the way that people can fan the flames of controversy," said James Murray, professor of animal science at the University of California, Davis, who argues that extensive scientific research has shown no danger from cloned animals. "This is just AI with the Internet. It's a storm in a teapot."
Opponents of the FDA's decision, however, point to a more recent precedent: the agency's approval of St. Louis-based Monsanto Co.'s synthetic bovine growth hormone (BGH) in the early 1990s.
Consumer groups immediately called for boycotts, and many dairy processors pledged to reject the drug. In the fourteen years since BGH's approval, its use has never exceeded about one-third of U.S. cattle. Recently announced plans to curtail or eliminate BGH by Dean Foods, Wal-Mart, Kroger, Safeway, Starbucks and other major retailers and manufacturers promise to squeeze that market share further.
"When Monsanto tried to get the entire dairy industry to embrace growth hormones, we understood that people who bought our milk weren't going to want it. The same lesson applies here," said Marcus Benedetti, president of dairy processor Clover-Stornetta Farms in Petaluma, Calif., which has said it will not use cloned animals.
On Dec. 28, the FDA said in a draft risk assessment that meat and milk from adult clones of cattle, swine and goats and their offspring are as safe to consume as that from standard animals. Therefore, it concluded, labeling shouldn't be required. (The agency said there is insufficient information on sheep clones to make a determination on food consumption risks.)
The FDA is seeking public comment on the subject until April and is expected to issue a final determination soon after. An agency spokesman did not respond to repeated inquiries for comment for this story.
The strongest evidence that the products of clones and their progeny will face difficulty gaining acceptance -- that the apt precedent is bovine growth hormone -- are surveys that consistently show that a majority of consumers hold a negative impression of such food.
"There's no doubt that consumers' aversion to or dislike of cloned products ... will translate to the marketplace," said Joseph Mendelson, legal director for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Food Safety. "For a variety of reasons, they will reject it."
The most common objections include animal welfare or religious or food safety concerns. A December 2006 poll by the Pew Initiative found that 64 percent of those polled were "uncomfortable" with animal cloning. Thirty-six percent felt unsure about the safety of cloned food, and 43 percent said it was unsafe.
"We are putting something out there, and we have no clue what the impact of it is," said Susanne Scott, a Castro Valley adult school instructor who falls squarely into the "unsafe" camp. "We're risking future generations, and we have no idea on what scale."
None of the scientific research into the safety of food from clones has found any evidence of danger. But some observers, scientists among them, believe that more research is necessary to adequately answer that question.
Of course, the degree to which consumer preferences affect the adoption of cloning technology will largely depend on how _ and if _ the products are labeled.
There are several forms this could take.
National or state legislators could pass laws requiring labeling of food products from cloned animals and their offspring. Indeed, last month California state Sen. Carole Migden, D-San Francisco, and U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., introduced state and federal legislation, respectively, to do just that.
If such laws don't pass, individual companies opposed to cloning appear willing to apply labels voluntarily, as happened after the FDA approved BGH. Clover-Stornetta, which became the nation's first dairy processor to stamp a BGH-related label on its products, is considering that possibility.
"At the end of the day, the only thing consumers ask for is choice," Benedetti said.
Given the soaring interest in natural foods, Mendelson feels that many manufacturers may pick this route as a means of distinguishing themselves in the marketplace and that many consumers will keep their eyes open for such labels.
There also are several practical challenges that will slow the entry of cloned products into the food supply, at least initially, said Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Because the FDA asked for a voluntary moratorium on animal cloning for food, there still are no facilities in place to mass-produce clones. At $15,000 to $20,000 a pop, cloning also is prohibitively expensive.
Because of that cost, even proponents of cloning believe that very few cloned cows will end up as beef or even dairy cattle. But clones' descendants could spread relatively quickly. Within four generations, a single bull whose semen is marketed by breeders can produce more than 100,000 descendants. It remains an open question whether consumers will react negatively, or even care, about those successive generations.
Cloning is an attractive tool for elite breeders because it is an efficient means of replicating and spreading preferred genetic traits: better taste, higher yields, less fat.
Currently, it takes five years to determine whether one bull has the right genetics to sire daughters capable of producing commercial-quality milk. Only one in 10 makes the genetic grade. Cloning would allow breeders to remove the guesswork involved in that process and improve the genetics of successive herds.
"Where the rubber meets the road is that we're going to have better beef and better milk," said Barb Glenn, managing director of animal biotechnology at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a Washington, D.C., trade group that represents companies hoping to commercialize cloning technology.
She said cloning animals that demonstrate natural resistance to disease could actually make food safer, contrary to the fears expressed in consumer surveys.
But Murray of the University of California, Davis questions the veracity of those polls in general. He pointed to a 2001 survey by the Food Policy Institute and Rutgers showing that half of respondents had a moral objection to animal cross-breeding. Cross-breeding means allowing two different purebred animals to mate _ think black Lab with golden retriever _ a ubiquitous practice for centuries.
The same survey found that 24 percent of people thought, incorrectly, that ordinary tomatoes don't have genes but genetically modified ones do, and that 22 percent believed that tomatoes genetically modified with genes from a catfish would probably taste fishy.
Murray believes that the cloning surveys reflect a similar lack of understanding about the technology _ stirred up by misleading science fiction and fearmongering among consumer groups _ rather than any deep-seated dread.
Once consumers become familiar with the concept, supporters say, they won't have any more problem eating a cloned animal than eating steak from a twin steer or consuming strawberries, potatoes, bananas or any of the many other vegetables that are cloned in commercial production.