Food and animals of clone origin could be secretly spread across supermarket shelves and farms within two years, watchdogs admitted yesterday. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) board said it would be impossible to set up a regime to trace and label food from ‘Frankenfarm’ animals. It claimed the international trade in embryos and semen from clone animals is already so widespread that it cannot be stopped or regulated. As a result, consumers could soon be routinely eating meat and milk from the offspring of cloned cattle without knowing about it. In an astonishing admission, the FSA chairman, Lord Jeff Rooker, said: ‘You can’t regulate what you can’t count and what you can’t check on . Thatisan impossibility. ‘How can we prevent the public being misled? We can’t on this.’ The watchdog’s chief executive, Tim Smith, suggested clone origin offspring could be widespread on farms without anyone knowing their location within two years. And clone origin food is already on sale in this country, according to the president of the National Farmers’ Union of Scotland, Jim McLaren. He said: ‘It’s happening everywhere else in the world and it’s happening in this country – it’s in imported products, it’s already here.’ He added that the law should be changed to legalise the sale of food from clone descendants on the basis ‘there is no food safety issue’ (Daily Mail)Thursday, 16 September 2010
Clone food 'in all our shops within two years' watchdog reveals
Food and animals of clone origin could be secretly spread across supermarket shelves and farms within two years, watchdogs admitted yesterday. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) board said it would be impossible to set up a regime to trace and label food from ‘Frankenfarm’ animals. It claimed the international trade in embryos and semen from clone animals is already so widespread that it cannot be stopped or regulated. As a result, consumers could soon be routinely eating meat and milk from the offspring of cloned cattle without knowing about it. In an astonishing admission, the FSA chairman, Lord Jeff Rooker, said: ‘You can’t regulate what you can’t count and what you can’t check on . Thatisan impossibility. ‘How can we prevent the public being misled? We can’t on this.’ The watchdog’s chief executive, Tim Smith, suggested clone origin offspring could be widespread on farms without anyone knowing their location within two years. And clone origin food is already on sale in this country, according to the president of the National Farmers’ Union of Scotland, Jim McLaren. He said: ‘It’s happening everywhere else in the world and it’s happening in this country – it’s in imported products, it’s already here.’ He added that the law should be changed to legalise the sale of food from clone descendants on the basis ‘there is no food safety issue’ (Daily Mail)