Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-09-08-Speech-3-451"
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"en.20100908.19.3-451"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, I should like to express my serious reservations about this issue.
On the one hand, we – the EU – are advocating greater food transparency for consumers, seeking to establish a system for tracing meat from farm to fork, and thus imposing very strict livestock farming and slaughtering standards on livestock breeders and certain controls for guaranteeing, as far as possible, the origin and quality of food. On the other hand, however, we learned this summer that British consumers had unknowingly eaten cloned beef. In my country, Belgium, there is even a possibility that third-generation meat, which we are told is not cloned meat at all, has been consumed. Is this ultimately what we mean when we talk about ‘traceability’?
Allow me to add a touch of humour: as far as I am concerned, I do not want to have cloned beef bourguignon and genetically modified carrots on my plate! And especially if I have not chosen to eat them. This seems to be the prevailing opinion across the EU, since all the Eurobarometer surveys carried out on the issue of cloning animals for food confirm time and again the very clear opposition of European citizens.
This is the first argument which I wish to cite against the presence of cloned animal products in the food chain: we cannot, on the one hand, call for consumers to be given greater responsibility and want them to be better informed about what they eat and, on the other, ignore their desire not to eat cloned meat.
My second argument relates to health. It is true that no scientific study has provided proof of any potentially negative impact from consuming cloned meat, meat from the offspring of a cloned animal, or even milk from a cloned animal. Nothing has been proven, and that includes the long-term safety of this type of consumption. I therefore think that the precautionary principle should still be applied.
My third and final argument is an ethical one, and you yourself raised it at the beginning of your speech. The EU wishes to be in the vanguard of animal protection. This afternoon, Parliament once again voted for a restriction on animal experimentation in order to minimise the pain and suffering inflicted on animals. However, there is no denying the fact that cloning causes animal suffering. One need only think back to Dolly and the EFSA Scientific Opinion of July 2008, which states that the health and welfare of a significant proportion of cloned animals has been found to be adversely affected, often severely, and with fatal consequences.
Mrs McAvan also referred to the opinion of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies, which doubted whether cloning animals for food is ethically justified, particularly as it cannot be justified by a need for food diversification. Quite the contrary: there is reason to fear that the promotion of food from cloned animals will have an indirect effect on genetic diversity due to the excessive use of a restricted number of animals in breeding programmes. This is what has happened in other food sectors; dozens of tomato species have disappeared, for example. In 1900, there were 7 000 species; today, there are only 150 left, 70 of which are commercially available, and a large number of those are genetically modified.
Is this the sort of progress we want? That is the question we must ask ourselves."@en1
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