Expert opinions on the regulation of plant genome editing

Global food security is largely affected by factors such as environmental (e.g. drought, flooding), social (e.g. gender inequality), socio-economic (e.g. overpopulation, poverty) and health (e.g. diseases). In response, extensive public and private investment in agricultural research has focused on increasing yields of staple food crops and developing new traits for crop improvement. New breeding techniques pioneered by genome editing have gained substantial traction within the last decade, revolutionizing the plant breeding field. Both industry and academia have been investing and working to optimize the potentials of gene editing and to bring derived crops to market. The spectrum of cutting-edge genome editing tools along with their technical differences has led to a growing international regulatory, ethical and societal divide. This article is a summary of a multi-year survey project exploring how experts view the risks of new breeding techniques, including genome editing and their related regulatory requirements. Surveyed experts opine that emerging biotechnologies offer great promise to address social and climate challenges, yet they admit that the market growth of genome-edited crops will be limited by an ambiguous regulatory environment shaped by societal uncertainty.