Commercial interests blamed for breakdown of EU talks on cloning

Compassion in World Farming calls on the European Commission to legislate as a matter of urgency

Dramatically, weeks of talks between the European Parliament and the EU Agriculture Council on cloning animals for meat and milk broke down in the early hours of this morning with the Chair of the European Parliament delegation, Gianni Pittella, accusing the Council of being "frozen by internal divisions and pressure from commercial lobbying".

Compassion in World Farming is deeply grateful to the European Parliament, which throughout the new EU Novel Foods Regulation conciliation procedure has insisted that the sale of meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring should be banned on the grounds of animal welfare. Consumers’ right to know where the food on their plates has come from was also major factor behind the European Parliament’s stance.

Regrettably, the EU Agriculture Council and the European Commission refused to agree first to a total ban, and then to mandatory labelling for all cloned animal products, and so the talks on a new EU Novel Foods Regulation collapsed.

The European Parliament pressed for a ban because the scientific evidence shows that cloning entails great suffering both for the cloned animals and for the surrogate mothers that carry them to birth. The outcome of a Eurobarometer survey showing that consumers overwhelmingly did not want cloned animal products on their plate was also cited.

Peter Stevenson, Compassion in World Farming’s Chief Policy Adviser, said, "British and other European MEPs have shown themselves to be true champions of animal welfare. The European Commission and the Agriculture Council ran scared of a trade war with the US and chose to ignore reports from their specialist scientific advisers that highlight the animal suffering that is inherent in cloning."

Peter Stevenson added, "This debate has become a battle about what kind of future we want for British and European farming. Are we going to move away from factory farming towards an agriculture that respects the well-being of animals and is in tune with nature? Or, are we going to pursue a high tech future that seizes on each new invention that emanates from the biotech laboratories, irrespective of the suffering inflicted on our farm animals, and even though the scientific evidence shows that industrial animal production is an inefficient way of feeding the growing world population?"

Although the current talks have collapsed, Compassion believes the debate on cloning must continue, otherwise we will increasingly see cloned cows and pigs and their offspring on our farms, and the food from these animals on our supermarket shelves. Compassion calls on the European Commission to urgently come forward with proposed EU legislation on the cloning of animals for food. That legislation should:

• Ban cloning in the EU;

• Ban the use of clones and their offspring on Europe’s farms – and this will mean banning the import of clones, their offspring and the semen and embryos of clones;

• Ban the sale of meat and milk from both clones and their offspring.