Commission promises new food regulation rules after animal cloning talks collapse
Commission to draft separate proposals on novel foods and cloning, after talks on a single law collapsed.
The European Commission responded immediately to the collapse of talks on Tuesday (29 March) on updating the 1997 ‘novel foods’ regulation. It promised to draft new, separate proposals: one on the less contentious issue of regulating new and unusual foods, and another on cloning for food production – the issue that proved an insuperable obstacle in this attempt at legislation.
A spokesman for John Dalli, the European commissioner for health and consumer policy, confirmed that the Commission would present separate laws on cloning for food purposes and other novel foods within the next two years. “We cannot stay forever with the 1997 rules,” he said.
When an all-night negotiating session between the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament and the European Commission ended with no deal, the Council and the Parliament blamed each other for the disintegration of talks. Three years of work had been lost, diplomats said, amid mutual recriminations.
During the 11-hour meeting, the two sides came close to a compromise on the question of whether to ban the sale of meat from the progeny of clones as the Parliament wished, but member states resisted.
Labelling row
The Council conceded that any food products derived from the first generation of clones’ offspring should be labelled as such, if a Commission report showed that it would be feasible. But the Parliament insisted that all food derived from clones and their descendants should be subject to labelling, without relying on the feasibility study.
The Parliament “chose to go down the road of political grandstanding…and tried to push the Council to accept a misleading, unfeasible solution that in practice would have required drawing a family tree for each slice of cheese or salami”, said Sándor Fazekas, Hungary’s minister for rural development, who led negotiations on behalf of the Council.
The Parliament blamed the Council for the failure of the talks. “We made a huge effort to compromise but we were not willing to betray consumers on their right to know whether food comes from animals bred using clones,” said Italian Socialist MEP Gianni Pittella and Dutch European United Left MEP Kartika Liotard in a joint statement.
Innovative foods
Meat and milk from cloned animals can be sold in the EU only if approved under the 1997 novel foods regulation.
These rules also cover innovative foods, such as margarines that claim to reduce cholesterol, or traditional foods not known in the EU before this date.
Dalli said it was “a great pity” that the EU had lost the novel foods regulation, which would have introduced new rules on nano-materials in food and faster procedures for authorising novel foods.
Before the talks collapsed, the EU institutions had agreed that food manufacturers should be obliged to get approval for and label any products containing nano-materials. Currently, only nanotechnology in cosmetics is regulated in EU law.