CLONING: NO RISK WITH MEAT LABELS

Thanks to the obligation to indicate products’ origins on labels, consumers can knowledgeably choose to acquire meat from the EU without running the risk of buying imported products from, for example, countries like the US where a verdict by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given the go ahead to distributing cloned products without any obligation to distinguish them from other products.
This was recently noted by Coldiretti, which emphasized that in Europe cloning cannot be used for commercial production and that in order to avoid cloned products arriving on dinner tables the origins of foods like pork, sheep, lamb, and dairy products must be put on labels. Coldiretti explained that it is necessary to defend at a European level the avant-garde Italian legislation, Law 204/2004, which has been fruit of the mobilization by Coldiretti and sustained by one million signatures, and which has already resulted in mandatory labelling for fresh milk since 2005, for poultry since 17 October 2005 and for tomato sauces since 16 June 2006.
Coldiretti concluded that this is a path that had already been undertaken at a European level when norms were created for labels indicating the origins of beef products in January 2002 after the Mad Cow scare, as well as with the obligation to indicate the variety, quality, and origin of fruit and vegetable products, as well as eggs in January 2004, and the country of origin of honey in August 2005.