Can Food From Cloned Animals Be Called Organic?

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 29, 2007

There's nothing like a tender steak from a free-range, grass-fed, hormone-free, antibiotic-free, organic and -- oh, yes -- cloned cow.

Or is there?

That's a question being raised by scientists, activists and government bureaucrats since the Food and Drug Administration concluded in December that meat and milk from cloned animals should be allowed on the market.

In the opinion of some in the biotechnology arena, the federal definition of organic food would allow them to label food from clones as organic, as long as those clones were raised organically.

"My interpretation is that it's not excluded at this time," said Barbara Glenn, chief of animal biotechnology at the Washington-based Biotechnology Industry Organization.

But the mere thought that a clone might earn the coveted organic label makes even the most mild-mannered foodies rabid.

"Over my dead body," said Margaret Mellon, director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy organization in Washington.

"I think it's unbelievable," said restaurateur Nora Pouillon, proprietress of the Nora and Asia Nora restaurants and Washington's doyenne of organic cookery.

"It's like putting artificial apples in an apple pie," said Joseph Mendelson III, legal director of the Center for Food Safety, a consumer group in Washington that has petitioned the government to more strictly regulate the sale of clone products for human consumption. "People would consider that a downright violation of the American way."

Officials at the Agriculture Department, which oversees the definition and certification of organic food, say the question will not be fully settled until it is considered by an advisory panel, perhaps by this spring. At that meeting, they predict, opponents will probably win, and the term "organic clone" will join the ranks of word pairs that simply do not belong together.

But nothing is ever certain in the federal rulemaking process. And a look at the USDA's legal definition of "organic" shows how tough it can be to regulate a science that is changing almost as fast as ink dries in the Federal Register.

The Agriculture Department spent years crafting a definition of "organic," integrating the advice of a record-breaking 50,000-plus public comments. But even after all that, said USDA spokesman Jerry Redding, the issue of clones "really never came up internally or externally until the FDA made its announcement about cloned animals being safe."

Now, like legal scholars poring over a Supreme Court decision, experts on both sides of the issue are examining the language of the department's six-year-old organic rule -- which, for all its detail, they are finding to be a squishy document open to interpretation.

Many clone-opposing readers of the rule are quick to note, for example, its clear statement that genetically engineered organisms cannot be organic. Surely, these opponents conclude, no animal is more engineered than a clone, which is conceived in a laboratory dish and has just one biological parent.

But the biotechnology companies that make cloned farm animals, such as Cyagra of Elizabethtown, Pa., and ViaGen of Austin, have for years been careful to distinguish between clones -- which are genetic replicas of other animals -- and genetically engineered animals, which have had genes added or subtracted to change specific traits.

The FDA has accepted that distinction and has emphasized that its preliminary approval of clones for food does not apply to gene-altered animals, which will have to pass more stringent safety tests.

Opponents also note that the organic rule excludes all animals made by "cell fusion." That technique is often the first step in making a clone, as scientists fuse a skin cell from the animal to be cloned to an egg cell whose DNA has been removed.

But cloning can be done without cell fusion -- by injecting the DNA from the skin cell directly into the egg cell, for example.

Other detailed exclusions in the organic rule fall similarly short of being slam dunk rejections of clones, several experts agree. That leaves opponents of organic clones falling back on some of the rule's more general language, such as the part that says an organic animal's growth and development must not be influenced by means "that are not considered compatible with organic production."

That language is sweeping, given the fuzziness of ideas about what "organic" means.

"For me," said Pouillon, "organic food means that everything goes through a sort of organic, natural process."

"Organic farmers work in harmony with nature, not to change it," echoed George Siemon, chief executive of Organic Valley, a farmers cooperative based in LaFarge, Wis.

But biotech industry leaders scoff at such language. If organic is so natural, they ask, why is it that the USDA allows organic cows to be conceived by in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination? If that is okay, why not cloning?

To which Pouillon responds dryly: "At least they still use sperm and an egg."

Even if the "naturalness" of various reproductive technologies remains open to debate, other principles are clearly central to the organic movement and leave the USDA no choice but to exclude clones, said Michael Sligh, a program director with the Rural Advancement Foundation International in Pittsboro, N.C.

"One of the principles of organic production is to encourage biodiversity," said Sligh, who was on the committee that drafted the organic rule in 2000. Without a doubt, Sligh said, the mass production of genetically identical critters runs counter to that.

Biotech officials counter that clones are unlikely to make up even 5 percent of the U.S. herd a decade from now, so they will have minimal impact on overall biodiversity.

But despite their belief that they ought to have access to the lucrative organic market, these companies may well decide that it is not worth going to the mat on this issue. And a decision to surrender might make a lot of sense, according to people who follow the debate.

After all, the FDA is still considering whether to insist that meat and milk from clones be labeled as such. The industry strongly opposes such a requirement because of fears that consumers -- who according to polls are not exactly salivating over the prospect of eating food from clones -- might interpret a "Made From Clones" label as a sort of health warning.

If "organic" were allowed to mean, among other things, that the food is not from cloned animals, the biotech industry can say to the FDA that explicit clone labels are not necessary because consumers already have a way to make choices.

"It allows them to say, 'If consumers want to avoid it, they can go organic,' " said Mendelson of the Center for Food Safety.

Ultimately it will be up to the USDA to decide whether a clone can be organic, based on advice from the agency's National Organic Standards Board. The board's next meeting is scheduled for March. An agenda has not yet been finalized.