The Real Reason Cloned Food Animals Are Dangerous

The FDA just approved the sexual offspring of cloned animals as human
food. There are many who oppose this decision, and the movement to
approve direct consumption of clones it heralds, but they do so for
reasons based on popular misunderstanding of the technology,
speculation as to long term effects, or its unintended consequences.
None of these reasons is a sustainable or rational basis for policy,
and they are easily refuted by industry and its apologists. Such weak
reasoning and lack of scientific rigor will lose this key debate over
the future of our industrial food system.

I have concerns
about cloned animals in the human food supply, but not for the reasons
most others do. The reason I argue for regulation of clones in our
livestock is based in the security and sustainability of the human food
supply, not the safety of eating cloned animals or their offspring.

The
history of human agriculture has been one of continually weeding out
irregularity and increasing predictability. Regularity and
predictability are the keys to increasing productivity and the
foundation of the application of industrial management and
mechanization techniques to agricultural production. Most of the plants
that form the basis of our industrialized food supply have already
passed through the eye of the needle of industrial genetics: most of
the plants that contribute to your diet are already clones – entire
crops can consist of a single genome. Cloning isn’t controversial when
applied to plants because it doesn’t viscerally strike us as a
perversion of the natural order.

There are undeniable benefits
to be had from narrowing genetic variation in our food supply, but the
cost of relying on a radically narrowed genetic heritage is illustrated
by the great corn blight of 1970. That year, 15% of the American corn
crop was lost to a fungal infection due to the industrially-induced
elimination of genetic variation in the corn crop. Monsanto’s patented
T-Cytoplasm genes were incredibly vulnerable to a strain of corn
blight, yet seed corn containing this time bomb had been incorporated
into 80% of the American corn crop because it offered much higher
yields.

Reliance upon a single gene line or too narrow a group
of gene lines is poor agricultural practice, even if it greatly
enhances production or profit. Agriculture is not just a business, it
is the basis of human existence. Catastrophic failures can cost lives,
not just profits. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)
for various livestock species are highly vulnerable to microbial
threats not only because of the close proximity of the animals, but
because they share so much of their genetic inheritance due to
intensive conventional breeding selection. This is the major reason why
the CAFO industry is so heavily dependent on massive use of
antibiotics. CAFOs
are continually poised on the edge of infectious disaster, and the
widespread use of cloning in breeding, by further narrowing the range
of genetic variation, could make the problem far worse.

Widespread
use of cloning to create our livestock could squeeze
down the genetic variation in our herds even further than than
selective breeding and genetic engineering, which have already
drastically reduced genetic variation. If cloning becomes widespread,
steps should be taken to maintain a reservoir of genetic variation. The
genetic variations dwelling in traditional food crops and livestock,
known as land-races, have been bred and selected for specific
micro-climates and local preferences across the millenia
of agricultural practice. Land-race genetic variation protects our food
supply from catastrophic failures because those breeds contain genetic
firewalls that limit the spread of infectious agents. Land-races
provide a deep well of genetic wealth from which breeders and
geneticists regularly draw to improve industrial crops and livestock.
There are some efforts to preserve crop land-races in production
(growing them out is the only way to truly maintain land-race lines),
but maintaining both crop and livestock land-race lines should become a
major goal of American agricultural policy to protect our food supply
against catastrophic failure due to narrowing of the genetic heritage
of our food crops and animals attendant upon the use of cloning.
Instead of price supports that encourage overproduction, perhaps
payments to husband and grow out land-races in their preferred
micro-climates would be a more rational means of having farmers serve
the public.

Reducing genetic variation in favor of a single
genome that contains all the best traits in the species that we can
select or engineer makes a great deal of economic sense. Using clones
in our food supply provides a great incentive to develop organisms that
enhance the efficiency and productivity of our industrial husbandry
system because one can patent an entire organism and more effectively
control the use of the one’s intellectual property. Clones may make
animal products cheaper, more abundant, and, yes, possibly even safer
to eat. They will also make our food supply more vulnerable to
catastrophic failures that can destroy ever larger percentages of our
food at a single stroke.

There is no inherent reason to fear
eating a cloned animal or its offspring. There is nothing unsafe about
its flesh, and it will likely not carry any significant risk of
unforeseen environmental harm. But by squeezing down to just a few
genomes the entire variability of our livestock species, we will
balance ourselves on a knife’s edge for the sake of greater efficiency
and profit for agribusiness. At any time, that knife could, and likely
will, slice off a significant percentage of our food supply in a
destructive epidemic that we simply can’t stop. Having cleared away all
the genomic firewalls in search of greater efficiency, we may harm the
genetic variability and thus the survival of the livestock humans rely
on.

I foresee no significant danger in using cloned animals or
their offspring for food, nor in animal breeding to increase the
incidence of certain traits within the population, but only if
variation is maintained by sexual reproduction and a conscious program
to husband reserves of genetic variation and maintain a prudent degree
of genetic variation in the food supply. If one used just a few genomes
to clone the entire breeding population of
a livestock animal, even the variation introduced by sexual
reproduction would likely not be able maintain sufficient genetic
variation to protect the species and our food supply. Of course,
regulation by the government would probably be required; private
enterprise hasn’t the incentive or interest to monitor the industry as
a whole for maintenance of a safe degree of the genetic variation. The
central
rationale for regulating cloning for livestock animals should be to
protect
against catastrophic failures by
maintaining sufficient genetic variation in those livestock animals
which form a part of the human food supply. Such a mission is far
different from the one the FDA is charged with of determining that
clones are simply safe to eat.

Many
would simply mandate that consumer labeling identify the products of
cloning, much as many wish to label the products of Genetically
ModifiedOrganisms . The hope being that consumer preference would
simply make the use of such techniques non-viable in the marketplace,
obviating the need to make difficult political decisions and mechanisms
through the judgment of the marketplace. I don’t share their optimism
about the market’s judgment. I support labeling GMOs:
the reasons for doing so are equivalent to identifying possible
allergens on labeling. People have had reactions to the proteins
present in GMO
foods which are not present in the unmodified organism. If any such
reason for consumers to know that a product came from a clone were
found to exist, I would support labeling it, too. But if there is no
actual difference between a sexually produced animal and a cloned one
with the same genome, what is there to warn the consumer about?

But,
in any case, labeling, as important as it may be, does not address the
broader question of how to protect the genetic variation of our food
supply. In my view, that is the most important issue that the use of
cloning to produce breeders or food animals presents; it is also the
issue that the widespread focus on the safety of eating such food tends
to overshadow.