Send in the Clones?

In one of the least surprising regulatory developments in ages, the Food and Drug Administration last month released a ream of data demonstrating that cloned cattle and other livestock are no different than their conventional twins. The FDA report had been anticipated for several years, and in recent months, it had been leaked to the media and the public. Still, rather than putting an end to controversy over the safety of cloned animal products, the FDA’s assessment is just the opening ante in what will surely be a high-stakes game of food politics.

The release of the FDA’s draft risk assessment on cloned animals started the clock ticking on a 90-day public comment period, which will run until early April. After that, the FDA will have to digest the thousands of comments (including NMPF’s) that will either commend or criticize the government’s review of this controversial issue.

All the while, the FDA will continue to ask the owners of cloned animals to withhold their meat and milk from the marketplace.

That voluntary moratorium has been in place for five years, but presumably it will be lifted at some point in the next year, once the FDA issues its final assessment.

NMPF’s position is that if in fact the milk from cloned dairy cattle is indistinguishable from sexually-produced cows (and that is what the FDA reported last month), then no labeling of any type should be allowed. FDA and USDA policies do not require genetically-modified plant foods to be labeled; it’s highly unlikely that the FDA would require labels for foods from clones, which are not genetically modified. The real question, however, is whether the FDA would allow voluntary absence claims, stipulating that the food products in question are not from cloned animals. Any such labels would have to be truthful and not misleading. The proper interpretation of these concepts is often in the eye of the beholder, however.

There are several reasons that this is such a hot-button issue, but what it really comes down to is that the cloning hullabaloo is the latest skirmish in the broadening battle over where and how food is produced. Most of the immediate criticisms of cloning have been less focused on safety – since there is no evidence that cloned animal products represent a public health concern – than on the ethics of using cloning to reproduce livestock. And that’s where the marketplace, not government regulations, will have to eventually sort things out, as it is already doing in similar areas.

We’ve seen this battle developing for decades over the future of food production, ever since the advent of the green revolution, which, ironically, featured new farming technologies that were supposed to be good for both producers and consumers.

From a marketing standpoint, however, the term “green” now means the opposite of what it did 50 years ago.

In the dairy sector, we went through a very comparable struggle 13 years ago, when rBST was first approved by the FDA amid the same type of controversy we’re witnessing today over cloning. Other genetically-modified foods followed, paving the way for the growth of the organic movement, eventually leading to the creation of a national organic program, and a proliferation today of certified organic products. Now that large corporations like Wal-Mart are investing heavily in organic marketing, a certain portion of concerned consumers will be looking in a new and different direction than big organic.

You can already see the seeds germinating for the next big food marketing push: products claiming they are grass-fed, pasture-accessed, locally-raised, sustainably-produced, family-owned, artisanally-crafted, or some combination of these other virtuous assertions. Don’t be surprised if clone-free is eventually among them.

While farmers have been utilizing a variety of breeding and feeding technologies over the decades to become more efficient, there’s been a high-profile pushback from at least some consumers who don’t see benefits from the use of certain practices. One of the biggest reasons for this, of course, is the disconnect that many people have from modern farming. Too few people understand that farmers, too, have to live in a modern world, and many elect to use the agricultural equivalents of HDTVs, PDAs, PCs, DVDs, Wiis, and a host of other technical-sounding acronyms.

At the same time, however, consumers eventually call the shots, and they have the ability to shoot down the cloning balloon before it ever really leaves the ground. This issue also signifies that technology is accelerating more rapidly than the public’s understanding of and ability to deal with it (Exhibit A: the love/hate relationship we have with email). The future of food production, regardless of the eventual role of cloning, will only get messier.

National Milk Producers Federation

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