On the agenda of the Council of Ministers scheduled to be held on Tuesday, a draft law “contains provisions related to banning the production of food and industrial feed and putting them on the market.” “This law makes provisions on prohibiting the production and placement of synthetic foods on the market,” reads the explanatory report of the ruling. It added that the ban “includes both food intended for human consumption and fodder intended for animal consumption.”

According to the information collected by AgiWhoever breaches the provisions may receive administrative fines “from a minimum of €10,000 to a maximum of €60,000 or up to 10% of the total annual sales made in the last financial year ending before the infringement was confirmed, when that is the case. greater than 60 thousand euros, in addition to the confiscation of the illegal product.”

Above all, so-called “artificial meat” is being targeted.. “Among the synthetic foods, the one most focused on research and production is meat that resulted from a cell culture process performed in a laboratory on animal stem cells,” bill reads. In some non-European countries – confirms the draft ruling – “studies aimed at producing such foods for commercial purposes” have reached an advanced stage, and in the United States the starting point has arrived for “the first laboratory-produced chicken meat, that is, meat produced by developing animal cells.” In the laboratory.” “The case for research and experimentation of synthetic foods seems to be emphasized — at an embryonic stage, so that one is not in the conditions, above all scientific, to be able to exclude that such industrially produced foods do not have adverse consequences for human health “.