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Within hours of the government's announcement that milk and meat from
cloned animals was safe, food companies insisted they had no plans to sell
such products and consumer groups said Americans had no plans -- or desires
-- to eat them.
The response to the Food and Drug Administration's announcement, however, may prove to be as overblown as it was speedy. Academics and industry officials say the target market for cloning technology is stud farms and breeders
-- not the rank-and-file dairy farms and cattle ranches that contribute to the nation's food supply.
"The average farmer is not likely to clone animals," said Terry Etherton, a professor of animal nutrition at Pennsylvania State University. "Cloning is not for standard production."
And with an array of far cheaper reproductive technologies at the ready, breeders are likely to reserve the pricey cloning techniques for their most prized and prolific studs.
With costs ranging from $15,000 to $20,000, cloning is just not in the budget for most farmers, says Leo Timms, a professor in the Department of Animal Science at Iowa State University.
That's an investment unlikely to pay off for farmers raising animals for food, Timms added. Even if consumers were comfortable with clone encounters at the grocery store, he said, "that animal's milk and meat aren't worth any more than any other animal."
At the same time, there are plenty of more affordable reproductive technologies, including artificial insemination and in-vitro fertilization. The cost of producing an animal using artificial insemination ranges from $600 to $700, said David Faber, president of Trans Ova Genetics of Sioux Center, Iowa, one of the two main U.S. cloning companies.
Viagen Inc. and Trans Ova Genetics already have produced more than 600 cloned animals for U.S. breeders, the vast majority cattle, including copies of prize-winning cows and rodeo bulls.
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 Breeding the old-fashioned way and via insemination, say proponents, provides another biological advantage: genetic adaptation.
"You make progress by breeding animals, not cloning them," said Chris Galen, a spokesman for the National Milk Producers Federation, which represents dairy farmers and supports continuing a voluntary industry moratorium on the sale of products from cloned animals. "With cloning, you just get a plateau."
And as reaction to the FDA announcement shows, you also get heightened ethical and moral concerns.
Consumer groups' objections aren't just about food safety but also include animal welfare, since many attempts at livestock cloning still end in fatal birth defects.
"If you have moral objections to a particular food, or ethical objections to them, FDA's saying,
'Tough, you've got to eat it,'" said Carol Tucker-Foreman of the Consumer Federation of America, who pledged to push for more food producers to shun clone-derived ingredients.
For now, Faber said, his company is targeting its cloning techniques at a small market of farmers raising elite breeding stock, what he calls "the rock stars of the barnyard," not those producing animals destined for the grocery store.
"Cloning is for breeding, not eating," he said. "We are making sons and daughters, semen and embryos, not meat and milk."
[Associated Press; By JOELLE TESSLER]
AP Business Writer Matthew Perrone contributed to this report.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
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