Meat Industry To Clone Animals On An Industrial Scale In China

The world’s largest center for animal cloning will open in China in 2016. Its goal will be to bring factory farming to a whole new level.

The cloning center’s objective will be to produce one million cow embryos per year. However, that´s not all, they will also clone racehorses, and even dogs and cats.

The center will be built by the Chinese biotechnology company, Boyalife Group, and the South Korean company, Sooam Biotech, which specializes in animal cloning.

The Executive Director of Boyalife Group, Xu Xiaochun, expressed at a press conference a couple weeks ago that “cloning technology is already here, it’s just that not everyone knows it.”

The already shady project, which is viewed with skepticism and has obtained a major negative response from the Chinese population, is accompanied by the dark past of the leader of the South Korean company, Dr. Hwang Woo-suk. After an international scandal, Hwang´s license to conduct genetic research was taken away from him and he was sentenced to two years in prison, after being accused of fraud, corruption, and violating bioethics laws.

The international meat industry has huge interests in China, where the growing purchasing power of the population is raising meat consumption. According to the data analysis company, Research and Markets, the demand for meat in China has been sending 13 million cows in 1991 to 47 million in 2011 to slaughter.

Animal cloning in livestock is a technique used in some breeding programs in the United States, but in September of this year, the European Parliament voted to ban the cloning of animals and food products from cloned animals. Parliament approved the ban, arguing that the technique involved a greater amount of suffering for the animals.

Before the Chinese cloned meat reaches the supermarkets in the country it must receive the approval of the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and other government agents. The director of Boyalife Group declined to comment on the matter. Also, the Chinese agriculture minister has not yet responded to questions from the press.

Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images