CRISPR-Cas Technology for Boosting Smallholder Farmers' Profitability and Climate Resilience
Family and smallholder farmers play a pivotal role in global agriculture by providing food and nutritional security. According to FAO, there are approximately 600 million smallholder farmers in the world with less than 2 hectares of land, producing about 80% of the food consumed in the developing world.
Further increase in land use for agricultural production is not an option. Thus, increasing the land productivity of these farmers is vital for enhancing food production. Besides increasing crop productivity, an urgent focus should be on raising the profitability of smallholder farmers. Importantly, the UN Agenda 2030 mentions doubling agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers by 2030 as part of Sustainable Development Goal #2.
Challenges Faced by Smallholder Farmers
However, farmers face various challenges, the foremost being climate change-induced, such as rising temperatures and frequent extreme weather events such as drought and floods impacting crop yields. Additionally, the increasing prevalence of pests and diseases causes major crop losses, and farmers end up spraying pesticides to protect their crops. This adds to the input costs and the negative environmental footprint of the farmers. Further, dwindling natural resources, for instance, water scarcity, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss, pose profound risks to global food security and livelihoods, particularly for smallholder farmers.
Also, the imperative of ensuring food security amidst a burgeoning global population in this era of climate change amplifies these challenges, as the global demand for food is expected to increase by at least 50% by 2050.
Considering the above challenges, access to the newly developed high-yielding but climate-resilient and pest and disease-resistant crop varieties needs to be ensured to enhance farmers' profitability and global food and nutrition security. Further, it is essential to develop crop varieties with enhanced input use efficiency of major nutrients (N, P, K), water, solar radiation, and land, with an objective to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as well as input cost to the farmers. Concerted efforts are particularly needed to reduce dependence on synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers and, subsequently, the emission of nitrous oxide, which is much more potent than carbon dioxide or methane, in causing a temperature rise.
Addressing these challenges and ensuring future food security necessitates that we promote the use and adoption of frontier, science-based innovative technologies to supplement the ongoing molecular and conventional crop breeding methods to support the farmers. Fortunately, CRISPR-based genome editing technologies have emerged as the need of the hour to accelerate the rate of genetic gains in different crops. Importantly, as shown by researchers worldwide, genome editing tools have the promise and potential to develop crop varieties for enhancing food production with minimal environmental footprint.
Current Applications of CRISPR-Cas in Crop Improvement
Globally, CRISPR-Cas-based genome editing is being applied to genetically improve about 70 crop species for food and agriculture. Some of the gene-edited crop products have already been approved or commercialized and include high-oleic soybean and pungency-free mustard green in the USA, tomato with increased gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) content and high-starch maize in Japan, fungal-resistant wheat in China, rice with higher water use efficiency and increased grain yield in India, and reduced browning banana for Philippines. With these few examples, it appears that the major focus is on consumer preferences, which undoubtedly is desired. However, emphasis must shift towards building sustainable agriculture and climate resilience while ensuring profitability for smallholder farmers.
Traits for increasing farmers’ profitability using genome editing
For agriculture to be profitable, farmers require crop traits that enhance yield, minimize input costs, and provide resilience to variable climate changes. Here are some key traits that contribute to their profitability:
- Crop varieties with high yield potential for maximizing returns per unit of land.
- Crops with durable resistance to diseases and pests have less need for expensive chemical inputs such as pesticides.
- Traits that enhance tolerance to abiotic stresses such as drought, high temperature, flooding, and salinity enable crops to thrive under challenging and harsh environmental conditions, thus reducing yield variability and financial risks to farmers.
- Crop varieties that utilize water, nutrients, and other natural resources more efficiently than conventionally bred genotypes to reduce input costs. While traits such as drought tolerance, efficient nutrient uptake, and enhanced nitrogen use efficiency contribute to sustainable agricultural practices, they also lead to farmers' profitability.
- Crops with shorter growth cycles and early maturity for quicker turnover of fields, enabling farmers to plant multiple crops in a single growing season. The early maturing varieties can also help mitigate risks associated with adverse weather conditions or pest outbreaks.
- Varieties with desirable nutritional quality traits command premium prices and enhance market competitiveness for farmers.
- Crop varieties are suitable for mechanical harvesting methods to reduce labor costs and increase operational efficiency, especially suitable for small-scale farming operations.
Fig. 1. Crop varieties with improved traits needed to achieve the specified goals for increasing famers' profitability using genome editing
The Promise of Genome Editing for Future Agriculture
Genome editing has the potential to develop crop varieties with most of the desirable traits for enhancing farmers’ profitability as listed above (see Fig. 1.). Cultivation of such genome-edited varieties by smallholder farmers can optimize returns on their investments, reduce production risks and build resilient and profitable agricultural systems globally. According to the World Economic Forum (2018), “If gene-edited seeds were adopted by 60-100 million farms by 2030, there could be 100–400 million tonnes more crops produced and 5–20 million fewer tonnes of production lost annually. Farmers’ incomes would grow by $40–100 billion, and nutrition would improve for 20–100 million people that suffer from micronutrient deficiencies”.
Despite the promise, challenges remain in harmonizing the regulatory frameworks on genome editing in crops of agricultural importance across different countries and addressing socio-economic concerns. Efforts are needed to develop suitable global policies favoring genome editing, especially for empowering smallholder farmers and ensuring sustainable agriculture practices.
Further reading
Bansal, KC, Molla, KA and Chinnusamy, V (2022). Genome editing: a boon for plant biologists, breeders and farmers. Current Science 123(1):15-19
Bansal, KC (2022). Genome Editing for Sustainable Agriculture. International Service for the Acquisition of Agro-biotech Applications (ISAAA), Philippines.
https://www.isaaa.org/blog/entry/default.asp?BlogDate=2/2/2022
Bansal, KC (2024). Biotechnological Applications for Sustainable Development of Agriculture. Diplomatist, March 5, 2024. https://diplomatist.com/2024/03/05/biotechnological-applications-for-sustainable-development-of-agriculture/
Bansal KC (2024). Future of GEd tech in Indian Agriculture, Agrospectrum, July 2024, http://www.agrospectrumindia.com
Jones, MGK et al (2022). Enabling Trade in Gene-Edited Produce in Asia and Australasia: The Developing Regulatory Landscape and Future Perspectives. Plants 11(19), 2538; https://doi.org/10.3390/plants11192538
Mangrauthia, SK, Molla, KA, Sundaram, RM, Chinnusamy, V and Bansal, KC (2023). Genomics and Genome Editing for Crop Improvement. In: Transformation of Agri-Food Systems, Eds. KC Bansal, WS Lakra and H. Pathak, Springer Nature, Singapore.
Molla, KA, Sretenovic, S, Bansal, KC and Qi, Y. (2021). Precise plant genome editing using base editors and prime editors. Nature Plants 7 (9), 1166-1187, 2021. 199.
Molla, KA, Chakravorty, N and Bansal, KC (2024). Genome editing for food, nutrition, and health (Editorial). The Nucleus, Springer-Nature, 67:1–4 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13237-024-00492-4
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