The sale of milk and meat from cloned animals moved a step closer yesterday after the US Government ruled that the products were safe to eat and could be sold in supermarkets without labelling.

The landmark draft decision, taken by the US Food and Drugs Administration, was condemned by consumer groups and food safety experts, who gave warning of the implications for food consumption throughout the world.

FDA officials said that they saw little problem with the controversial technology, which could result in cloned food being sold in the US within months without any labels identifying its origins. They added that cloned food products, if approved, could also be exported.

Authorities in Britain have yet to address the issue of the sale of food from cloned animals, including those approved by the US — cattle, pigs and goats. However, precedents set by the FDA are often followed by UK and European authorities. The Food Standards Agency said last night that it had not received an applications for the marketing of food products from cloned animals in the United Kingdom.

The move would have to be approved by the European Union before such products could be introduced, even if they were only being imported from the US. The UK’s Advisory Committee for Novel Foods would also be consulted.

The FDA, which overseas food safety for the US Government, determined after a five-year review that food from cloned livestock was as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals. The decision was all the more controversial because the agency declared that special labels were not needed to alert shoppers to its origin.

Decrying the ruling, consumer groups gave warning that cloned food would enter the food chain untested on humans, and from a field of science in which cloned animals are often born sick or with severe abnormalities. “Consumers are going to be having a product that has potential safety issues and a whole load of ethical issues tied to it, without any labelling,” said Joseph Mendelson, legal director of the Washington-based Centre for Food Safety.

Some US consumer groups maintain that surrogate mothers, in which the cloned animals are grown, are treated with high levels of hormones. They claim that clones are often born with severely compromised immune systems and receive massive doses of antibiotics, opening the way for large quantities of pharmaceuticals to enter the food supply.

The US National Academy of Sciences also warned recently that the commercialisation of cloned livestock for food production could increase the incidence of food-borne illness, such as E-coli infections.

Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat senator from Maryland, wrote in an open letter to the FDA: “Just because a scientist can manufacture food in the laboratory, should Americans be required to eat it?” Experts say it would probably take years for sales of cloned food to begin in earnest, because the technology’s high cost makes it prohibitive for most farmers. It costs about $15,000 (£7,500) to clone one dairy cow. But already several hundred cattle among America’s nine million have been cloned.

The FDA pointed out that many consumers confuse cloning with genetic modification. To produce a clone, the nucleus of a donor egg is removed and replaced with the DNA of a cow or other animal. A tiny electric shock coaxes the egg to grow into a copy of the original animal. Supporters of the technology say that it will be used primarily for breeding good milk and meat producers, and that produce will most likely be drawn from offspring, rather than the cloned animal.

The FDA said yesterday that meat and milk from clones was as safe to consume as products derived from naturally raised animals. Within six to eighteen months, cloned animals were “virtually indistinguishable” from conventionally-bred livestock, it said. “Meat and milk from cattle, swine and goat clones is as safe to eat as the food we eat every day,” said Stephen F. Sundlof, the director of the FDA Centre for Veterinary Medicine.

Final approval for lifting the current ban on cloned food could come early next year. The agency will accept comments from the public for the next three months before announcing a final decision.

The Consumer Federation of America said that it would run a publicity campaign to ask food companies and supermarkets to refuse to sell cloned food. Polls show already that most Americans do not favour eating such a product, and many food companies are skittish about selling cloned food.

Opponents also maintain that cloning results in high failure rates and distress for the cloned animals. The Centre for Food Safety points to the example of Greg Wiles, whose Maryland farm was the first to have cloned cows. He says he told the FDA that one of his cloned cows was having terrible health problems, but was ignored.

Imports from the US to the UK

Meat: total 3,146 tonnes

2,995 tonnes fresh pork cuts, bone-in

78 tonnes fresh bovine meat and offal (other than liver)

42 tonnes poultry meat and offal (other than liver)

26 tonnes bovine meat, fresh or chilled, boneless

3 tonnes bovine meat, bone in 1

tonne pork meat and offal (other than liver)

1 tonne bovine meat, bone in, frozen

Dairy: total 1,216 tonnes

1,172 tonnes of ice cream and other edible ices

22 tonnes of powdered cheese

11 tonnes of yoghurt

10 tonnes of fresh (unripened or uncured) cheese 1 tonne of whey and

modified whey

For 2005 Source: Defra

Q&A

Are cloned meat and milk safe?

Yes. There are no reasons to believe that meat or milk from cloned animals are unsafe to eat. Studies have shown no meaningful differences except, perhaps, in the right direction. Beef from cloned cattle, for example, shows better marbling of fat and lean — a desirable feature — because the clones were made from prize animals that themselves had this quality.

Why should anyone want to do it?

Cloning is a way of duplicating the best animals. It is expensive, so meat or milk from these animals will not be sold as food. But they will be used as parents of the next generation, improving the quality of herds.

Isn’t there a risk of deformities in cloning?

There is. Cloned animals tend to be large at birth, and some suffer genetic changes. But those that are fit and normal do not appear to differ in any important way from conventional animals.

So what’s the problem?

Food safety scares are often a proxy for other, less easily voiced, concerns. Many people find the idea of cloning distasteful, and worry about animal welfare implications. To them these products are distasteful on moral rather than food safety grounds.

Isn’t the answer simply to label such food?

That’s probably a sound idea, even if hard to implement in practice. What happens five generations down the line, when the clone is a distant ancestor of the beef we are eating or the milk we are drinking? Is it still cloned? And how could the system be policed, given that there are no identifiable differences that could be used to check suppliers’ claims?

How soon will cloned food come our way?

Novel foods — of which this would be one — have to get EU approval before they can be marketed. In the UK, the Advisory Committee for Novel Foods would also have an opinion. No applications for marketing cloned foods have been made, so for the moment they could not be sold.

But if it’s identical, how would we know we aren’t already eating it?

Good question. Some websites in the US already offer semen from cloned bulls, so presumably cloned bulls have already sired offspring that have sold for beef in the US — and maybe over here too.