Forget Star Wars Clone Wars, cloned livestock looks to be the current trend most developed countries, like the U.S., are heading. Food and Drug Administration issued a draft ruling last year stating that meat and milk from cloned animals are safe for human consumption.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has also taken an interest in this and is also carrying out its own investigation into the safety of cloned food and the impact on animal welfare, biodiversity, and the environment .

The director of Genesis Faraday (a scientific partnership based in Edinburgh) Chris Warkup, has given a few thoughts on this, its implementation, and the current status of prime meat in the industry.

If the FDA say what they seem minded to say, you might expect meat and milk from the progeny of clones - not clones themselves - to be on the U.S. market in the not-too-distant future. There is a pyramid structure in animal breeding. All the breed improvement occurs to a few elite animals at the top of the pyramid.

The big advantage of the Dolly technology (somatic cell nuclear transfer) is that you know what the animal's potential is, because you are taking the DNA from an adult. You could even take cells from a beef carcass on the slaughter line and recreate the animal that produced that very impressive carcass.

We are totally opposed to the cloning of animals for food production purposes. The process is inefficient, and has a huge potential to cause the animals involved unnecessary pain, suffering and distress - for absolutely no valid reason.