Collapse of EU talks opens floodgates for cloned foods

"This was the pity of not coming to an agreement, because the present situation- where there is no control at all on cloning techniques or clones - will be again the rule in Europe," said EU consumer commissioner John Dalli.

Following all-night negotiations in Brussels, MEPs were ready to drop their demand for a ban on the sale of food from the conventionally bred offspring of cloned animals, in return for mandatory labelling.

But EU states said that would risk dragging the 27-nation bloc into a "full blown trade war" with countries that export goods derived from the young of cloned animals, such as the United States.

"The European Parliament… tried to push the (European] Council to accept a misleading, unfeasible 'solution' that in practice would have required drawing a family tree for each slice of cheese or salami," said Hungary's farm minister Sandor Fazakas. Hungary, which chaired the talks as holder of the EU's rotating presidency, said it had been ready to accept a ban on cloning for food in Europe and "the gradual introduction of labelling" for products from the offspring of clones, starting with beef.

A Brussels-based diplomat from a non-EU country said the failure of the talks was good for states that export meat and other products to Europe. "We are happy because it keeps the status quo. Parliament's position would have had very hard consequences for international trade," the diplomat said.

The parliament's negotiators accused EU governments of ignoring public opinion, citing a 2008 survey that showed that 58 per cent of Europeans believed cloning should never be used for food production.

"We made a huge effort to compromise, but we were not willing to betray consumers on their right to know whether food comes from animals bred using clones," MEPs Gianni Pittella and Kartika Liotard said in a joint statement.

The use of cloning for food production is not believed to be widespread in Europe, but Denmark is the only EU country to have banned it, and the lack of EU rules means there is a dearth of reliable data on its use.

The US is the most advanced country in terms of cloning for food production, with estimates suggesting that "thousands of cattle" and "hundreds of pigs" have been cloned there so far.

The US currently has a voluntary moratorium on the marketing of food from cloned animals but not from their offspring.

Animal cloning, which uses DNA transfer to create an exact genetic copy of an animal, currently has a success rate below 20 per cent, with most clones dying during or shortly after birth.

The technique is complex and costly, ensuring cloned animals are unlikely to be used themselves as food, but they can be bred to produce offspring that share similar traits, such as high milk production or rapid growth.