European consumer and societal stakeholders' response to crop improvements and new plant breeding techniques

Abstract

The global demand for providing nutritious, sustainable, and safe diets for a 10 billion population by 2050 while preserving affordability, reducing environmental impacts, and adapting to climate change will require accelerating the transition to sustainable agri‐food systems. A plausible way to help tackle these challenges is by developing new plant varieties that have improved crop yield, plant nutritional quality, and sustainability (or resilience) traits. However, stakeholders, consumers, and citizens' concerns and appreciation of future‐proofing crops and the acceptability of new plant breeding strategies are not well‐established. These groups are actors in the agri‐food systems, and their views, values, needs, and expectations are crucial in helping to co‐design fair, ethical, acceptable, sustainable, and socially desirable policies on new plant breeding techniques (NPBTs) and the transition to sustainable agri‐food systems. In this study, we engaged with consumer experts and societal stakeholders to consider their perceptions, expectations, and acceptability of improving crops and NPBTs for future‐proofing the agri‐food systems. Our analysis points to a need for governments to take a proactive role in regulating NPBTs, ensure openness and transparency in breeding new crop varieties, and inform consumers about the effects of these breeding programmes and the risks and benefits of the new crop varieties developed. Consumer experts and societal stakeholders considered these strategies necessary to instil confidence in society about NPBTs and accelerate the transition to sustainable agri‐food systems.

CropBooster‐P: Towards a roadmap for plant research to future‐proof crops in Europe

“…The CropBooster-P database can be considered as a literature repository that can be continuously updated with state-or-the-art literature in the fields of yield, nutritional quality and sustainability. Within the project, the database serves as a foundation because it is both scientifically sound overview of the current state of the art in distinct research fields, as well as a resource with which to engage in discussion with stakeholder groups (Nair et al, 2022;Stetkiewicz et al, 2022) and the general public in later phases of the CropBooster-P project.…”

“…To this end, WP3 ('Engage society') engages the general public in a dialog about the need for crop improvement. To do so, consumers and other non-expert lay people are engaged in a series of workshops and events (Nair et al, 2022;Stetkiewicz et al, 2022) to find out how the issues of the CropBooster-P project are perceived and what the specific objectives of different societal groups are. To understand and advise how to best communicate complex scientific information to different societal groups, including the general public in Europe, attitudes, expectations and appropriate means of communication are explored through questionnaires and interviews in WP6 ('Outreach and communication').…”

“…The CropBooster‐P database can therefore be considered as an expert resource including recent advances and/or key findings with regard to traits that have been successfully selected/changed and that could contribute to the future‐proofing of our crops in terms of increasing plant yield, sustainability and nutritional quality. Within the project, the database served as a foundation because it is both a scientifically sound overview of the current state‐of‐the‐art in distinct research fields, as well as a resource with which to engage in discussion with stakeholder groups (Nair et al, 2022; Stetkiewicz, Menary, Nair, Rufino, Fischer, Cornelissen, Duchesne, et al, 2022) and the general public in later phases of the CropBooster‐P project.…”

“…To this end, WP3 (‘Engage society’) engaged the general public in a dialog about the need for crop improvement. For this, consumers and other non‐expert lay people were engaged in a series of workshops and events to find out how the issues of the CropBooster‐P project are perceived and identify the specific objectives of different societal groups (Nair et al, 2022; Stetkiewicz, Menary, Nair, Rufino, Fischer, Cornelissen, Duchesne, et al, 2022; Stetkiewicz, Menary, Nair, Rufino, Fischer, Cornelissen, Guichaoua, et al, 2022). On the topic of crop improvement, participants ranked environmental sustainability traits, also referred to as traits underlying crop resilience, higher than those improving nutritional quality or only increasing yield.…”

“…Having identified a suite of scientific and technological crop improvement options, their social, environmental and economic impacts were analyzed in WP2 (‘Impact assessment’) (Nair et al, 2022; Stetkiewicz, Menary, Nair, Rufino, Fischer, Cornelissen, Duchesne, et al, 2022; Stetkiewicz, Menary, Nair, Rufino, Fischer, Cornelissen, Guichaoua, et al, 2022). To prioritize the traits to select for to future‐proof our crops and to identify and discuss the wider social, economic and environmental impacts of adopting these crop improvements, experts from farm‐level to businesses and supply chains to the consumer have been consulted in a series of online workshops and surveys (Menary et al, 2021; Nair et al, 2022; Stetkiewicz, Menary, Nair, Rufino, Fischer, Cornelissen, Duchesne, et al, 2022; Stetkiewicz, Menary, Nair, Rufino, Fischer, Cornelissen, Guichaoua, et al, 2022).…”