Cloning mad cow

Well, that’s fine on your side of the Atlantic. But Europe has a different legal viewpoint on that one. And Brussels now just got aware that beef from US clones has illegally entered the human food chain in the UK – and has been eaten in the last few months. The Food Standards Agency said it had now traced all four cows and four bulls that were bred in Britain from embryos harvested from a cloned cow in the US. The UK agency discovered that meat from two of the bulls has been eaten while farm inspectors were still trying to establish whether milk from two of the cows had been sold for human consumption.

Very clever, indeed. Instead of lobbying the European Parliament which reiterated its position on 7 July 2010 and now called on the European Commission to prepare a separate proposal to ban food from cloned animals and their descendants, you tought the Brits the good old Sinatra style: Just do it your way.

Remember? Two years ago the European Commission submitted a proposal to the European Parliament and the European Council, aimed at harmonizing the rules for the placing of novel foods on the EU market. EU rules on novel foods date back to 1997 and are meant to guarantee that techniques such as cloning do not harm consumers. Basically, while the Commission and Council now wanted to have cloned meat covered by novel food rules that are already in place, the Members of the European Parliament instead called for new legislation to expressly prohibit the sale of meat from cloned animals and their descendants.

Yes, we know that such a ban could create conflict with countries such as the US, where regulations on cloned animals are more lax. But does your “special relationship” with the guys on the island really force them to behave like that? If someday, someone from the Continent finally pulls the plug in the British Channel to sink them, don’t come to me crying…

Dr. Andreas Geiger is Managing Partner of Alber & Geiger, a leading EU government relations law firm in Brussels.