In October 2024, Dr. Qu Dongyu, the General Director of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) took the stage at the World Food Prize to deliver the keynote address. Dr. Qu’s talk revolved around the question of what “the future hold[s] for agrifood systems and food culture.” Key to this future, he suggested, was the “genetic revolution,” and specifically genome editing; a collection of technologies that allow scientists to alter genetic code through direct intervention. This ability, he suggested, would have sweeping effects for food and farming systems:

Gene-editing technology accelerates the breeding process significantly[, and it] might do more than just improve crop yields; they could also bring people and cultures closer together. By preserving and enhancing the unique traits of local and indigenous foods, gene editing can help protect our diverse food heritage. These innovations ensure that traditional crops, long embedded in local food cultures, can thrive in a changing, stressed world. Gene editing, in this way, becomes a bridge between the past and the future, connecting food cultures and fostering shared resilience in the face of global challenges.

As scholars of food and agriculture, we, too, believe in the power of food in bringing people together. We also believe that food heritage, systems, and knowledge should be valued and protected.

But whether genome editing is a technology to usher in this sort of future is a complex matter. We recently published an open-access special issue on genome editing and the future of food in Elementa. The issue’s collection of articles—whose authors hail from academic, research, and policy institutions—explores how these issues play out on the African continent. Africa is not only home to emergent genome editing applications but is also a place where many are calling for greater investment in genome editing systems.

As scientists, officials, and farmers begin to engage and make decisions around genome editing initiatives, it is important, as Dr. Dongyu stated, to think about safeguarding “the unique traits of local and indigenous foods,” and discuss whether genome editing will be one tool to do so.

Currently, there are no genome-edited crops for commercial sale on the continent (and very few available elsewhere in the world). Instead, this relatively nascent technology is being used to address biotic and abiotic stresses like disease and drought in a range of crops, from cassava to cocoa. These initiatives are mostly global collaborations taking place in just a handful of African countries. For example, scientists at Kenyatta University and Addis Ababa University have partnered with Corteva Agriscience to develop sorghum resistant to a parasitic weed, Striga. In Uganda, researchers at the National Crops Resources Institute are collaborating with the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center (USA) and Corteva to develop virus-resistant cassava.

To see these early projects focus on both staple and commodity crops is encouraging. With that said, in the early days of genetic modification—the predecessor of genome editing—there was similar excitement that the technology would be applied to locally relevant crops. As time went on, however, large corporations captured much of the technology through exclusive patents and focused on developing commodity crops they could sell at scale.

As a result, a majority of genetically modified crops available for commercial use are commodity crops such as corn, cotton, soy, and canola, and are bred to be either pest-resistant, herbicide-tolerant, or both. While these crops are grown at scale by farmers in some parts of the world, they are largely out of reach and simply not appropriate for most of the world’s smallholder farmers.

What’s more, public research and extension institutions have historically been underfunded, which has seriously impeded research on local crop varieties and traits. This has hindered the ability of countries to build local seed industries and left researchers under-resourced, hindering their ability to access the latest plant breeding innovations.

In an attempt to make this technology accessible to both farmers and scientists on the African continent, some funders have forged public-private partnerships to develop genetically modified, as well as biofortified, crops for smallholders. As some of the papers in our special issue point to, these efforts have had checkered outcomes. Part of the issue is a simple one: farmers are a diverse group with diverse needs. Breeding varieties and traits that farmers find beneficial is both essential and difficult. Farming systems on the continent are equally diverse and complex, considerations which have not always been taken into account with efforts to genetically engineer crops. Another issue relates to the arrangements in which breeding initiatives take place: such projects comprise a range of actors with different motives and power relations, which tend to crowd out the voices of the farmers themselves.

These complexities have stymied the uptake of genetically engineered crops across the continent, despite massive investment in their development. Given this precedent, many hope that genome editing will offer an alternative path, one that allows the technology to be taken up by farmers, scientists, and researchers working within local institutions, who are best equipped to identify and work on local and indigenous foods.

Although genome editing initiatives on the continent are so far housed within public institutions, most of them have been either funded by external donors and/or in partnership with corporate entities. Take the “Striga-smart” sorghum project, for example. This is a public-private partnership between universities in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Corteva, and funded through the US Agency for International Development. Like genetic medication, genome editing is increasingly being captured by patents. This has meant that scientists and researchers interested in using the technology must access it through licensing agreements with entities like Corteva. The details of these agreements aren’t often made public, so it’s difficult to know exactly what they entail. But it is reasonable to assume the patent holder (in this case, Corteva) has set the agreement to benefit their proprietary technology.

Power dynamics—expressed through licensing agreements and funding, for example—are essential components for understanding how genome editing is unfolding on the continent. This is especially poignant in the current moment, where one of the technology’s biggest funders on the continent, the US government, has suspended the majority of its international funding. We cannot divorce technologies such as genome editing from larger political and economic structures that shape global food systems. These are likely to shape the future of agrifood systems more than genome editing’s technical capacities. .

Rather than heralding genome editing as a savior that could serve as a “bridge between the past and the present,” we might look instead to the people and plants who already hold generational knowledge and successfully embed resilience within African food systems. This could mean, as one of our papers suggests, adopting the responsible research and innovation model and inviting farmers to be equal collaborators within genome editing initiatives. It might also mean, as another paper proposes, decolonizing agricultural development by centering diverse “ways of knowing and being,” shifting funds toward local practices and knowledge systems, and building farmer-led research initiatives.

Examples of the latter abound. In Malawi, for example, Soils, Food and Healthy Communities engages in farmer-led research on issues ranging from soil health to seed security. In Kenya, the Kenyan Peasant League is advocating for seed law to be revised to include farmers’ rights to produce, save, and exchange seed. And in Ghana, the Centre for No-Till Agriculture provides training and educational programs on agroecology and conservation practices.

This work is already “[bridging] the past and the future, connecting food cultures and fostering shared resilience in the face of global challenges.” It’s time that global institutions acknowledge and support this work, alongside their advocacy of genome editing. Doing so may allow different bridges and futures to emerge, opening possibilities for retooling food systems that center the resilience of the communities themselves.