Cloning, Biodiversity, and why we should be paying attention.

The FDA has, as all alert readers of the Guide to the Doom should know, announced that there is "no public health risk from eating cloned foods." However, the beautiful and brilliant Kristin forwarded an excellent article that took the issue a little further. Cloned animals are very expensive- about $20,000 per cow, as opposed to (Ok, brief tangent here- it is very hard to find livestock prices online) between $675 and $1500 for a non-cloned heifer. Why are farmers willing to pay so much more for a cloned animal? "Cloned animals are derived from the healthiest animals in the herd and therefore are more disease-resistant and offer leaner meat than conventionally produced animals, Dr. Sundlof said."

However, not everyone agrees with this sunny statement. "That assertion is disputed by the Consumers Union, a nonprofit consumer-safety organization that says the cloning process produces a sick animal that often dies soon after being reproduced. Furthermore, the organization contends that cloning weakens animals' disease resistance because the cloned animals need more antibiotics to survive. "

This is especially interesting in light of the arguments against genetically modified (GM) crops. These battles, sometimes actually physical, have taken place mostly in the UK and within the EU, with activists, scientists, politicians, big businesses and farmers in serious disagreement about what to do about GM crops. It's a hell of a messy issue, but here are the two main points.

Pro-GM crops: The "Green Revolution" is the parent of the current GM debate, and many NGOs point to early successes such as the "pro-vitamin A enriched Golden rice which has the potential to prevent much childhood death from infectious disease, and insect protected Bt rice which can reduce exposure of farmers to synthetic insecticides." "Many proponents of current genetic engineering techniques believe it will lower pesticide usage and has brought higher yields and profitability to many farmers, including those in developing nations ".

Anti-GM crops: The argument here is that the use of GM crops threatens biodiversity. Not only is relying only one main variety of plant for food known to be dangerous should that food become diseased, as in the Irish potato famine, but the ecological impact of GM crops is largely unknown. "Genes will inevitably escape from genetically modified crops, contaminating organic farms, creating superweeds, and driving wild plants to extinction, an official EU study concludes. "Several preliminary laboratory based studies suggest an adverse impact on biodiversity. Monarch butterfly larvae fed only on leaves covered in pollen from Bt corn grew more slowly and suffered higher death rates. Similar results were reported for pink bollworm fed on cotton producing the Bt toxin. Aphids fed on GM potatoes producing a different toxin were also reported to have a harmful effect on ladybirds feeding on the aphids."

The issue is also clouded by politics ( an actual headline- "America's masterplan is to force GM food on the world") and by worldwide growing distrust of the few super-corporations who control the bulk of the world's wealth, such as Monsanto, the best known biotech company.

The question I have, I guess, is given that it is known that "monoculture can lead to large scale crop failure as this single genetic variant or cultivar becomes susceptible to a disease", will a monoculture of cloned livestock lead to similar vulnerabilities?