Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada.
The Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada.
Plant Biotechnol J. 2021 Jun;19(6):1104-1109. doi: 10.1111/pbi.13597. Epub 2021 May 11.
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.
全球粮食安全在很大程度上受到环境（如干旱、洪水）、社会（如性别不平等）、社会经济（如人口过剩、贫困）和健康（如疾病）等因素的影响。有鉴于此，广泛的公共和私人投资于农业研究主要集中在提高主要粮食作物的产量和开发作物改良的新特性上。在过去十年中，基因组编辑开创的新育种技术获得了实质性的进展，彻底改变了植物育种领域。工业界和学术界一直在投资并努力优化基因编辑的潜力，并将衍生作物推向市场。一系列先进的基因组编辑工具及其技术差异导致了国际监管、伦理和社会分歧的日益扩大。本文是对一项多年调查项目的总结，该项目探讨了专家如何看待包括基因组编辑在内的新育种技术的风险及其相关监管要求。接受调查的专家认为，新兴生物技术为应对社会和气候挑战带来了巨大的希望，但他们承认，由社会不确定性塑造的模糊监管环境将限制基因组编辑作物的市场增长。
