on Jan 10th, 2007
Who’s in control of our food chain?
With the recent bad press that the UK government got over ‘loosing’ foreign national prisioners that should have been deported after serving their sentence, it may therefore come as little surprise that they seem to know very little about the activities of some agri businesses and cloned animals.
Today, the Daily Mail (whilst using pretty scare-mongering language) reported on the birth of a ’super cow’. Whilst not a clone herself, the calf called ‘Dundee Paradise’ is the daughter of a clone, her mother was created in the U.S. using cells from the ear of a champion dairy Holstein.
Dundee Paradise herself began life in an IVF lab. She was flown to the UK in a batch of five frozen embryos, implanted in a surrogate mother and successfully delivered at a Midlands farm on December 2.
Both the food and farming ministry Defra and the Food Standards Agency admitted last night that they had known nothing about the calf’s birth, or even the arrival of the batch of embryos last year.
Three years ago Defra rejected advice from its own experts to set up a safety assessment and policing regime. It means there are no laws preventing farmers from rearing clones or their offspring.
Supporters of cloning believe Dundee Paradise and animals like her could provide the nucleus of Britain’s future dairy herd. The calf was valued at £14,000 even before she was born. Read the full article here.
FSA in Court over ‘lax’ GM Controls
In a separate incident which also highlights the government’s lack of knowledge and control over agri-businesses, Friends of the Earth is taking the Foods Standards Agency to court over their lax GM controls.
A High Court Judge has given FoE the go ahead to take a legal challenge against them to a full hearing at the High Court on 20 and 21 February. This follows the discovery of illegal GM ingredients in US long grain rice in all the big supermarkets.
FoE said “We believe that the FSA failed to adequately protect consumers from GM rice that is not approved for human consumption, despite emergency legislation from Europe requiring them to do so.”