EU risk governance of 'cloned food' regulatory uncertainty between trade and non-trade

This chapter analyzes the difficulties of creating a viable legal framework for ‘cloned food’ in the EU combining a legal perspective with insights from the interdisciplinary research on risk governance. Animal cloning offers an instructive example for the challenges of designing regulatory frameworks for scientific innovations in the EU, especially in the area of food safety. It presents a nebulous combination of challenges to devising effective regulation: scientific uncertainty about risks to human health and the environment; strong international trade interest in the free circulation of ‘cloned foods’ on the EU market; and other concerns (e.g. ethics) as well as societal resistance and negative consumer preferences that affect the legitimacy of regulatory approaches. This mix of circumstances has hampered the establishment of new legal rules for animal cloning under the EU Novel Foods legal framework. The analysis of this paper reveals that the establishment of viable EU legal rules in this area has been afflicted with problems due to the complexity and multi-sectoral nature of animal cloning regulation. Moreover, strong pressure from the international trade market and international trade rules has resulted in persistent institutional disagreement over animal cloning. This indicates that legal and political pressure from EU’s external trade partners hampers the willingness and ability of the EU to establish precautionary and responsive risk frameworks.