Regulatory approaches for genome edited agricultural plants in select countries and jurisdictions around the world

Abstract

Genome editing in agriculture and food is leading to new, improved crops and other products. Depending on the regulatory approach taken in each country or region, commercialization of these crops and products may or may not require approval from the respective regulatory authorities. This paper describes the regulatory landscape governing genome edited agriculture and food products in a selection of countries and regions.

Keywords: Agricultural biotechnology; Crops and plants; Genome editing; International trade; Regulatory approach; Safety regulation.

Fig. 1

Decision tree for NBT products from the Ad Hoc TWG of the National Committee on Biosafety of Philippines (NCBP), with minor modifications. *Includes insertion using the new CRISPR-CAS with Prime Editing (Anzalone et al. 2019), ** Not to be confused with Synthetic Biology, which specializes on sequences/genetic elements (e.g. unnatural base pairs) in the genome that are not found in nature (beyond novel combination), ***Pertains to a largely synthetic assembled genome