Genome editing offers a precise way to breed more productive, nutritious and sustainable crop varieties — many indistinguishable from conventionally bred ones, at a fraction of the time and cost — but, a new report from the UK-CGIAR Centre argues, the innovations will not deliver without policy and regulatory environments that allow the products to be produced, used and sold. Written by Dr Matt Heaton for the Centre's wheat improvement project, the article sets out findings from a dialogue with global leaders on genome-editing regulation.

The regulatory landscape is shifting fast: 34 countries now have frameworks for genome-edited products and another 39 are changing theirs. Argentina created the first framework in 2015; others adopted or adapted its model or worked within existing plant-product rules, building a consensus that transgene-free edited crops should be treated like conventionally bred varieties while those carrying transgenes follow GM pathways.

The nuances matter, the report finds. Countries differ on where to draw the GM line — for instance whether cisgenics, the transfer by GM methods of genes between species that could be crossed conventionally, counts as GM — so the same product can be classified differently across jurisdictions, creating friction in deployment and exchange. The question is increasingly not whether a country permits edited crops but how it identifies them and how well its approach aligns with neighbours and trading partners.

After three years of research on the global regulatory ecosystem, the project convened a mutual policy-learning event in June 2026 with policymakers, regulators and plant scientists from eight countries; its findings are published as the UK-CGIAR Centre dialogue report 'Opportunities for Alignment in Global Genome Editing Policies and Regulations', aimed at researchers, regulators and product developers, and drawing on regional alignment already achieved across Central and South America.

Its recommendations: establish a cross-disciplinary community of practice linking policymakers, researchers, regulators, businesses, communicators, environmentalists and farmers; improve monitoring and visibility of policies and secondary legislation through open web tools; improve learning on public engagement beyond the 'deficit model'; investigate an international instrument or body to guide alignment and standards, since none exists for edited products; and learn from alignment in fields beyond GM, such as biocontrol, gene drives, fair trade and forest certification. The work sits within the Centre's 'Crop genetic improvement for future climate resilience' project, managed by CABI, with the workshop led by the John Innes Centre and the Norwich Institute for Sustainable Development, funded by UK International Development.

Source: CABI