Redesigning Animal Agriculture

Regulatory Issues
The regulatory requirements for these emerging
technologies in food-producing animals
are still evolving. They mostly involve the
appropriate regulatory bodies addressing
environmental risks, animal welfare and
food safety. Only once these policies have
been implemented will transgenic animal
technology in agriculture have the opportunity
to move beyond the research realm.
Gene-flow to wild species has been a
considerable issue in the transgenic plant
debate. Generally, the ability to physically
contain and control the breeding of farmed
livestock is far greater than with plants and
so the threat of inadvertent transmission
of transgenes is considerably diminished.
Animal welfare issues are discussed separately,
below.
National food regulatory bodies are
awaiting signals from international organizations
such as the FAO/WHO, who are
still in the process of broad consultation
and defining guidelines for controlling the
safety of genetically modified food products
derived from livestock. The Codex
Alimentarius Commission of the Joint FAO/
WHO Food Standards Programme has established
general principles for the risk analysis
of food derived from modern biotechnology
(FAO/WHO, 2003b) and, more specifically,
is presently developing draft guidelines for
safety assessment of animals produced via
recombinant DNA technology, based largely
on those established for plants (FAO/WHO,
2003a). General guidelines suggesting how
to evaluate the safety of food products from
cloned and transgenic animals are available
from various regulatory agencies (Rudenko
et al., 2004; Kelly, 2005). The safety assessments
are largely based on the premise that
a healthy animal is likely to produce safe
food and through the use of a comparative
approach to evaluate the composition of food
products. Moreover, guidelines are available
to assess food for possible unintended
health effects (Committee on Identifying
and Assessing Unintended Effects of
Genetically Engineered Foods on Human
Health, 2004). To gain regulatory approval,
Cloning and Transgenesis 109
the assessment of food safety in genetically
modified animals will likely be a complex
process. Whilst this is the norm for evaluating
new drugs, it might be prohibitive
for food products with commercial values
that are orders of magnitude lower than
those for human therapeutics. There is the
expectation that every line of transgenic
animals would have to be considered on a
case-by-case basis, as the risk is ultimately
associated with the particular genetic modification
involved and the method used for
its introduction. Whilst regulators might
tackle the science-based assessment of food
safety, the general public may not be satisfied,
as a broader range of ethical and personal
values are evoked by this technology
(Einsiedel, 2005).
Consumer Acceptance
Transgenic technology is controversial in
the public arena. There has been a great deal
of discussion portrayed in the media over
many years, expressing the views from both
sides of the debate. Whilst proponents extol
the potential benefits, opponents highlight
their belief that the technology is ‘unnat ural’
and of the uncertainty towards the long-term
environmental and health impacts. With
such polarized views, the general public are
often left wondering who to believe. With
a general erosion of public trust in scientists
and companies developing these products,
there remains a relatively low level of
informed awareness in the wider community
and scepticism in regulatory oversight
(Einsiedel, 2005; Small, 2005). Moreover,
distinctions between cloning and genetic
engineering are not necessarily made by the
public. This is not helped by the fact that
NT is a method used to produce an animal
from a transgenic cell – so the two technologies
are intimately intertwined, further
compounding the difficulty for the layperson
to clearly distinguish them.
Public surveys conducted in New
Zealand have shown that support for
genetic modification has increased slightly
over the last 5 years, especially in the biomedical
area, with 33% of respondents