Automatically regulating all gene-editing products as GMOs as opposed to the product-by-product approach adopted by most other countries is going to mean South African agriculture, the economy and consumers will bear a very high opportunity cost.
With gene editing, a wide range of crops can become available to farmers. Some of these crop products will be classified as GMOs due to the insertion of foreign DNA. However, most of the new crops, which have no foreign-added DNA, will conform to crops that could have evolved in nature completely by themselves and therefore are not GMOs in any scientific sense.
Automatically regulating all gene-editing products as GMOs as opposed to the standards adopted by most other countries around the world – which is a product-by-product regulatory approach – is going to mean South African agriculture, the economy and consumers will bear a very high opportunity cost.
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In fact, the costs are so high that the South African National Seed Organisation (Sansor) has recently written to the minister of agriculture, land reform and rural development to ask for immediate action to correct the regulations.
