The senator of National Party (PN), sebastian da silvais driving a bill that seeks to prohibit the manufacture, commercialization and/or importation of synthetic meat (artificially created in a laboratory) in the Uruguay.
The initiative promoted by Da Silva, and which entered Parliament this Friday, also tries to prevent this type of product from being called or labeled as “meats“, in the case of any product “that is not of animal origin in its composition”.
The project entitled “Naming and labeling of products of plant origin with names associated with other industries / marketing of artificially produced food products”, seeks “make transparent” the true composition of the “artificial meat” facing consumers.
In the past, Da Silva had already been very critical of this type of meat through his Twitter account. In December 2020 declared “staunch enemy” of the “synthetic meat“, and in February 2021 he said that” the statements of Bill Gates about synthetic meat should alert us”.
Along these lines, with the intention of shielding the national meat industry, the legislator ensured that laboratory meat “poison people” and “can cause cancer“. In turn, the text of the project ensures that “in vitro meat has an environmental impact equal to, or even greater than, livestock production.”
Animal protection groups exploded against Senator Da Silva
Criticism of Da Silva’s position did not wait, the Animalist Platform (PA), a group that brings together 35 animal protection NGOs throughout the country assured that it is “Incredible how Senator Da Silva continues to show that it is everything that is bad for the planet and non-human animals and also humans”.
The message from PA via Twitter is because, according to their understanding, “One of the causes of climate change is livestock“, where “in addition, the consumption of water is enormous,” adds the tweet.
Given this, Da Silva quickly replied by the same means: “Radical animalists attacking the national interest. Uruguay is the world’s agricultural country, no matter how much it weighs on them.” And he added, “no matter how much it hits us, we will continue to defend it (the project). And in that defense we will continue to care for the environment.”
Da Silva went further and in another tweet he again targeted PA: “The joke would be that pastoral livestock pollutes. but it’s not a joke, It is an insult to the country and a supine ignorance“.
In another vein, a couple of economists also came out to question the white senator’s project, as in the case of Paul Rossellifrom Exante, who argued that the initiative was equivalent to “ban looms to protect weavers“.
For Rosselli, it “has the potential capacity to harm consumers and simultaneously to exclude the Uruguayan meat complex from a technological development whose future cannot be stopped by Uruguay”, a vision that was replicated by the also economist, jose licandro.
Source: Ambito
