Government ready bill to stop production and trade of synthetic meat – Corriere.it

A bill containing provisions on the subject of a ban on the production and placing on the market of synthetic food and feed appears on the agenda of the Council of Ministers to be held on Tuesday. This law lays down provisions on the prohibition of the production and placing on the market of synthetic foods, reads the explanatory report of the provision. And it is added that the ban includes both food intended for human consumption and feed intended for animal consumption.

According to the information collected by the Agianyone who violates the provisions may receive administrative fines ranging from a minimum of 10,000 euros up to a maximum of 60,000 euros or up to 10 percent of the total annual turnover achieved in the last financial year ended prior to the ascertainment of the violation, when this amount exceeding 60,000 euros, in addition to the confiscation of the illicit product.

Above all, the so-called “synthetic meat” is targeted. Among synthetic foods, the one on which research and production is most concentrated is meat, which is the result of a cell cultivation process carried out in the laboratory on animal stem cells, the premise of the bill. In some non-European countries – it is underlined in the draft of the provision – studies aimed at the production of such foods for commercial purposes are at an advanced stage and in the United States the go-ahead has arrived for the first chicken meat produced in the laboratory, i.e. a meat that is produced by developing animal cells in the laboratory. The status of research and experimentation of synthetic foods seems – it is underlined – to be at an embryonic stage, such that one is not in the conditions, above all scientific, to be able to exclude that such artificially produced foods do not have negative consequences for the health of human beings.