The conservation and sustainable use of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture and emerging biotechnologies.

Abstract

Abstract The 50% increase in food production required to feed an ever-growing global population, and which must be attained under dire climate change scenarios and other constraints, will not be attained with a 'business as usual' mindset. For crops, the current cultivars will have to be replaced by ones that are more nutritious, stress tolerant and input-use efficient and that would produce higher yields with less external input. Generating such varieties requires significant efficiency enhancements to the conservation and characterization of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture and their use in plant breeding. Genome editing holds great promise in this regard. Its rapid adoption as a relatively cheap and rapid means to generate precise and predictable heritable variations and its universal applicability mirror the developments of the closely associated gene drive. Large amounts of digital sequence data are also increasingly available, while the field of synthetic biology has been expanding rapidly. This all holds great promise for improving and broadening the genetic base of crop varieties for the enhancement of crop productivity without damaging the environment. However, the pace of the scientific and technological developments for these methods has far outstripped that of the requisite policy regimes. The demonstrable potentials notwithstanding, the developments have not been universally accepted. The ongoing debates include whether the products of genome editing, with or without gene drive, should be considered living modified organisms and, if so, subject to the international framework, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity. Another debate is whether digital sequence information should be subject to some access- and-benefit sharing regime, considering that, with the power of synthetic biology, products previously harnessed only from living organisms can now be produced in the laboratory once the DNA sequence is available. There are also debates about ethics. In order to avoid the mistakes of the past, a call is made for evidence-based multi-stakeholder (including especially intergovernmental) dialogues on the safety, fairness and ethics of the use of these emerging biotechnologies, as the stakes are extremely high.