Maximizing social, economic, and environmental benefits from genome editing technologies in agriculture

Public Impact

Maximizing social, economic, and environmental benefits from genome editing technologies in agriculture

Principal Investigators

Completed Project

We are developing strategies for disseminating emerging technologies and optimizing supply chains to maximize the societal benefits of agricultural genome editing.

Application of genome editing technology in agriculture presents multiple opportunities for economic and environmental improvement and has the potential to contribute to global development and sustainability goals. However, genome editing is also likely to encounter obstacles because of political objections and regulatory hurdles, as well as individual constraints on grower adoption. By assessing the impact of the genome editing technology in agriculture under different conditions for heterogeneous actors, we are identifying diffusion strategies and agricultural supply chain designs that will allow applications of genome editing technology to move from the lab to the field most effectively. Finally, by assessing the impact of genome editing technology in agriculture on several dimensions of environmental quality, food security, and economic welfare (surplus to consumers, to farmers of different types, and to industry in different countries), our work is informing on-going policy debates and providing guidance for the assessment and diffusion of emerging technology in agriculture.

Graph depicting adopters of new technologies — The threshold model assumes that the adoption of a new technology will depend on a producer attribute–for example farm size–that will have some critical value beyond which producers will adopt that technology. From year to year, that critical value will change to make the technology more accessible, and the number of adopters in any given year can be modeled as the number of producers whose characteristic–the farm size–lies between the critical value in one year and the critical value in the next.
Figure appears in: Sunding D, Zilberman D. 2001. Chapter 4 The agricultural innovation process: Research and technology adoption in a changing agricultural sector. Handbook of Agricultural Economics 1:207–261.

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Pam Ronald and David Zilberman Elected to National Academy of Sciences

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recently elected 84 new members, including two IGI Investigators. Pam Ronald from UC Davis and David Zilberman of UC Berkeley join the NAS in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. The National Academy of Sciences is a private, non-profit institution that was established under a […]