It comes about due to a concern about how to define foods from cloned animals and plants. The tendency is to consider that they would be covered by novel food legislation, although a completely new set of laws may be required.. The Council has different opinions to the Parliament and so the temporary ban has been proposed to give time to determine the outcome.

The proposed ban is only for food related cloning, so all other currently permitted cloning will still be allowed to continue as is.

This raises an interesting issue of how to define these types of foods and what labelling etc will be required. It is another example of how the law is often playing catch up to science.