UK-CGIAR Centre roundtable in Morocco opens new discussion on precision-bred crops in North Africa and beyond
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Scientists from Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Pakistan and the United Kingdom gathered in Rabat, Morocco for a meeting at the British Embassy on precision breeding technologies.
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Credit: John Innes Centre
Scientists from Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Pakistan and the United Kingdom gathered in Rabat, Morocco for a meeting at the British Embassy on precision breeding technologies and their potential for nutritional security.
The roundtable on “Regulation of Precision Breeding for Global Food Security” brought together representatives from Morocco’s National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) and British Embassy with researchers collaborating as part of the UK-CGIAR Centre to deliver more resilient, nutritious and sustainable wheat varieties.
As malnutrition is increasing globally and harvests are under rising pressure from climate change, precision breeding offers an approach to accelerate crop improvement for nutritional security.
Precision breeding allows targeted improvements to crop genetics that can be used to develop more productive, nutritious, resilient and sustainable varieties. These precise changes to plants are of the same type as those that can occur through conventional breeding or natural variation.
Unlike forms of genetic modification, precision breeding does not rely on adding genes from organisms that cannot naturally cross with the crop. Consequently, many countries are revising their regulations to recognise precision-bred crops as different from genetically modified organisms. For instance, Kenya updated their guidelines for precision breeding in 2022, and the UK implemented the Precision Breeding Act in November 2025.
The UK-CGIAR Centre wheat project researchers attended the meeting to provide technical knowledge about precision breeding technology and share current regulations for this technology across the project’s represented countries. Researchers gave examples showing how their regulatory frameworks were formed and operated, and how this has affected crop development. The aim was to support understanding of new policy in regulating precision-bred crops, encourage mutual learning between country regulations and build connections between policymakers and precision breeding experts.
“At a time of increased global focus on precision breeding, this UK-CGIAR Centre event enabled John Innes Centre bioscience expertise to feed into new academic and government spaces," said Professor Cristóbal Uauy, Director of the John Innes Centre in Norwich. "Building these dialogues is essential to support the innovation and regulation needed to deliver better crops for farmers and society."
“Precision breeding is a tool that could help countries adapt to climate change, reduce food losses and improve nutrition, but these benefits can only be realised with enabling policy environments,” said Dr Matt Heaton, Norwich Institute for Sustainable Development. “At a time when countries are changing national policies regarding precision breeding, this UK-CGIAR Centre roundtable enabled decision-makers to engage directly with diverse technical leaders in this field.”
The roundtable event was made possible through a training programme led by the John Innes Centre as part of the UK-CGIAR Centre project, which brought together crop technology researchers to Morocco. The training event, known as AfriPlantSci, was hosted over two weeks across ICARDA-Morocco and Mohammed VI Polytechnic University. The workshop trained early career researchers from across Egypt, Kenya, Morocco and Pakistan in research skills and modern breeding techniques for cereal to apply these approaches from their home institutions.
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