Call for Australia to join the global fight against cell-cultured

A United States cattle industry leader has warned Australian producers about a new movement to produce cell-cultured protein and urged industry to form an international presence to halt its progression. National Cattlemen's Beef Association's former president Todd Wilkinson put the call out to Northern Territory Cattlemen's Association conference attendees at Alice Springs, NT, and delivered a stirring message about "radical animal activists" who were writing the script for farming operation policy. The similarities between the challenges for American and Australian producers came as a shock to Mr Wilkinson and his biggest concern, was a new "phenomenon". "This is one of our biggest challenges in the next decade," he said. "They want to take a cow cell and put it into a bioreactor, added with a heap of goop and generate meat cells." This technology itself was not the threat, according to Mr Wilkinson, but its end purpose was. "They want to capture about 20 per cent of the meat ...