One of the first issues that will confront the incoming European Parliament of 2014 will be the controversial subject of how to regulate the production of meat from cloned animals. Today the European Commission published a revised proposal for legislation to regulate cloned meat. An earlier draft had been withdrawn in 2011 because MEPs were deadlocked with the European Union’s member states.

Meat from cloned animals is not currently subject to any specific EU-wide restrictions, and cloning is not yet being used for food production. But health campaigners and religious leaders worry that the practice could develop in the coming years.

Provisions on animal cloning were included in a draft law on ‘novel foods’ (foods not consumed significantly before 1997), published in 2008, but had to be withdrawn in 2011 in order to get the rest of the legislation passed.

The provisions now come in the form of three amendments to the novel food law – two proposals to ban the use of the cloning technique on farm animals and to ban the import of such animals and one on the marketing of food from animal clones.

Although the proposed law would ban the cloning of farm animals, cloning for research purposes would be allowed. Cloning would also be allowed for conservation of rare breeds and endangered species or use of animals for the production of pharmaceuticals and medical devices, where the use of the technique can be justified.

Controversially, the proposals would not require meat from the offspring of cloned animals to be labelled. This was the central point on which negotiations between the Parliament and the Council of Ministers collapsed in 2011.

MEPs insisted that meat from all descendants of cloned animals should be labelled as such. But member states were opposed to this saying it would be too complicated and costly. The most they were willing to compromise was to label meat from the first generation offspring, but this was not enough for MEPs.

“These measures are unfortunately a near duplicate of previous efforts which failed three years ago, which leaves us at a standstill,” said Monique Goyens, director general of European consumer organisation BEUC. “The Commission had plenty of time to come up with a more ambitious proposal. The lack of progress is disheartening.”

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The Commission said labelling would be complicated and costly, and that a comprehensive impact analysis and feasibility study would be required before such a measure could be considered. This is likely to meet fierce resistance in the Parliament.

At their meeting on Monday, MEPs on the Parliament’s environment committee warned a Commission official, ahead of the publication of the text, that offspring should be labelled.

Others pointed out that an EU ban on cloned animals only would be pointless, as it wouldn’t make commercial sense to clone animals for meat. 

““Farmers have to respond to consumer demand and cloning does not currently seem to be feasible either from an economic or market point of view,” said Pekka Pesonen, secretary-general of farmers association Copa-Cogeca.

Tonio Borg, European commissioner for health, said today that though the Commission has decided against proposing going further by labelling offspring of clones, this will be an issue for member states and MEPs to settle between themselves during negotiations.

The new crop of MEPs may prove more willing to compromise on this issue than their predecessors.