Cloned cattle controversy

The US Food and Drug Agency could be ruling as soon as next month on draft guidelines for the sale of barnyard clones of cattle and their products: milk, meat and offspring. The regulators are likely to bow to pressure from farmers and the agro-cloning lobby to drop the voluntary moratorium on the sale of genetic material from clones. The new guidelines are widely expected to be liberal, opening the door to commercial exploitation of farmyard clones. Within a year to 18 months, milk from cloned calves and their natural born offspring could be on the American breakfast table, and there may be no requirement for producers to label it any differently from conventional milk. There are well over 1,000 cloned cattle, pigs and goats in the US which have generated relatively little attention, as have GM foods, which are largely unregulated. But American breeders could be in for a shock if they try to sell cloned embryos abroad. Although the advent of clones has been greeted with relative equanimity in the US by scientists and regulators, the import of semen and embryos from clones is likely to arouse deep suspicion in Europe, where peoples’ views on the agricultural industry are still informed by BSE and GM foods. ‘You would be putting semen from a cloned animal into the food chain when you don’t really know what its second, third and fourth generation progeny are going to be like. We took the view it was far too risky a thing to do,’ said Richard Wood, chief executive of the British cattle breeding company, Genus. ‘We think it is totally irresponsible for any farmer or any other company to sell commercial semen from clones at this stage.’ But market pressures are heavy. The trade in cattle semen and eggs between Europe and the US and Canada is about $100 million per year, and there is high demand in Britain for imported bull semen for artificial insemination. In the wake of BSE and foot and mouth disease, British farmers are restocking and looking for top-quality material. A prize ram recently fetched a record price of £140,000 at a local farm sale. So are clones likely to prove an attractive addition to the shopping list? In the US, scientific opinion lies mostly on the side of the clones. In a study published in the PNAS earlier this year, researchers found no significant differences between the products of naturally produced animals and clones. ‘We gave low to no concern to the products of cloned animals,’ said zoologist John Vandenburgh, of North Carolina State University. ‘If an animal like a cow has been cloned or transgenically modified and then used to breed other cows, we found no basis for concern for food produced from those animals.’ There is no law in Britain to prevent the import of semen from cloned stud bulls. But the high cost of the scientific procedure, together with the fear of public hostility across Europe, means that milk or meat derived directly from clones is unlikely to reach Europe in the near future. But many in the US believe that European farmers will find the prospect of replicating such high yielders irresistible and that the issue is just a question of time. Cloned cattle controversy