Lawmakers of the European Union Want Comprehensive Ban on Animal Cloning

Cloned farm animals are not used for food but for breeding purposes, with their embryos and semen used widely in the United States, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. The European Union's current proposal banned farm animal cloning but would allow the sale of meat and milk produced by their descendants. Now, EU lawmakers have backed calls to tighten up this proposed ban on cloning animals for food so as to ensure they never find a place on European farms. The European Commission is set to ban animal cloning in the 28-nation bloc but MEPs said, "We had to go further to halt all imports and the use of cloned products to ease public concerns about food safety."

MEP Renate Sommer, who presented the recommendations in a report to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, said, "Up to now, we have been able to import reproductive material from third countries. We are washing our hands letting others do the dirty work. We want to ban comprehensively. Not just the use of cloning techniques but the imports of reproductive material, clones and their descendants. I'd like to ask the European Commission to rethink this whole thing."

Lawmakers and the public are deeply suspicious about Brussels allowing the widespread use of animal cloning and genetically modified foods under the terms of a massive free trade agreement being negotiated with the United States. The EU leaders said, "Health standards will not suffer but Parliament remains sceptical about the merits of what is known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)."

Giula Moi, who with Sommer brought the recommendations forward, said, "We need to take into account the impact on animal health but also on human health. This report sends the message to our trade partners that we are not willing to put our own health, our families' health, and future generations' health at stake using products of dubious quality of this nature. We want to be sure that we don't go down a path from which there is no return."

EU Food and Health Safety Commissioner Vytenis Andriukatitis said, "The restrictions in the report were not justified, arguing that descendants of cloned animals showed no health problems while a complete ban might be difficult to sustain in law."

Source-AFP