After three years and three rounds of negotiations between the Council and the European Parliament, lawmakers and member state representatives failed to agree on food obtained from naturally conceived offspring of clones.
While the two institutions agreed to ban the use of cloning in animal reproduction for food production, and to ban comestible products from cloned animals altogether, they clashed on allowing onto the EU market food obtained from clones’ offspring.
As a compromise, the Parliament proposed mandatory labelling of such products, rather than a ban, to enable consumers to choose whether they want food produced indirectly via cloning technology.
But the Council said it was willing to agree to label only one type of product: fresh beef.
According to the Parliament delegation, the Council also refused to give the EU assembly a right to veto new additions to the novel foods list.
Negotiations ended after 12-hour marathon talks, when the Council refused a final compromise offer from the Parliament and the Parliament delegation refused to continue discussions.
The failure means that the whole process will have to be restarted from scratch, with the Commission having the option of tabling a new review proposal.
Meanwhile, the bloc’s current Novel Foods Regulation, in force since 1997, will continue to apply.
However, the regulation doesn’t cover new types of food or food production techniques developed since 1997, including for example the use of nanotechnology.
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