India takes the plunge, but some crop sectors remain hesitant.
May 4, 2025, could be a significant day in the history of agriculture.
On that day, Indian agriculture minister Shri Shivraj Singh Chouhan announced the release of two gene-edited rice varieties.
The announcement signals to the world that India — a country of nearly 1.5 billion people — is committed to gene edited technologies and modern tools to improve crop production.
“Under the guidance of the prime minister, agricultural research has been given a new direction,” said Shri Chouhan in a statement from the Indian government.
“This is a golden opportunity for the agriculture sector…. These new varieties will play a leading role in heralding the second Green Revolution.”
Gene editing involves changing the genetic code of a plant with technology such as CRISPR-Cas9, a technique used to cut sections of DNA. Scientists from California and France won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of CRISPR.
It allows scientists to precisely change a plant’s DNA to achieve desired traits, such as improved disease resistance or healthier oil in the kernel.
The new rice varieties in India will provide multiple benefits, says the Indian government:
- Nineteen per cent increase in yield.
- Twenty per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
- Improved tolerance to drought, salinity and climate stresses.
India’s decision to embrace gene edited crops may have global implications because the country is the world’s largest producer of rice. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agriculture Service has estimated that Indian farmers will harvest more than 120 million acres of the crop in the 2024-5 crop year.
“India does exports of over $12 billion U.S. dollars of rice, every year. They’re not going to risk that, unless they knew their export markets were accepting gene edited rice,” said Peter Beetham, co-founder and president of Cibus, a California company that uses gene editing to develop unique crop traits.
One of those traits is canola with resistance to sclerotinia stem rot, a major disease for canola growers in Western Canada.
In April, the USDA ruled that the Cibus disease resistance traits — created with gene editing — will be designated as not regulated, which means they will receive the same oversight as crop varieties developed through conventional breeding.
In early May, Cibus received other positive news around its gene edited traits. Regulators in Ecuador decided that rice cultivars containing Cibus’s herbicide resistance traits will be treated the same as conventional rice varieties.
That decision represents a major change in Ecuador’s approach to plant technology, Beetham said.
“Ecuador actually had a law banning GMO (genetically modified crops),” he said.
“It’s exciting to see a country that was so adamantly against GMO (has) accepted and understood why gene editing was different.”
Gene editing technology has been on the scene for a while — the CRISPR technique was first publicized in 2013.
However, many countries, including Canada, have been slow to approve its use in agriculture. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency sanctioned the use of gene edited crops in livestock feed in the spring of 2024.
“The finalized CFIA guidance on livestock feed will support research and development of new varieties that use gene editing to enhance traits such as drought, pest and disease resistance, and input use efficiency among others,” said Krista Zuzak, director for crop protection and production with Cereals Canada.
Global approvals of gene edited technology over the last six months signal that governments and food companies are getting on board with the technology, Beetham said.
“Two years ago, I would have been a little bit less bullish…. I would have said, ‘we have to get out and educate key stakeholders like the millers and processors.’ ”
Regulators in India and elsewhere may be moving forward with gene edited crops, but some plant breeders are still wary about consumer acceptance.
Aaron Beattie, an oat and barley breeder at the University of Saskatchewan, said the oat industry is taking a cautious approach to gene edited oats.
“The end users, whether that is the consumers or the food companies that sell these (oat) products, would probably be a little hesitant about using them,” he said.
“The oat community … they’re not against gene editing, but the question is, what trait is so important that you would want to go down that path and test the waters?”