POLICY AND PRACTICE REVIEWS article
Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol.
Sec. Biosafety and Biosecurity
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2025.1592675
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Future of Agricultural Biosafety RegulationsView all 10 articles
Agricultural Biotechnology in the Courts: Judicial Opinions and Commentary
Provisionally accepted
- College of Law, University of Oklahoma, Norman, United States
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Seven jurisdictions from around the world have issued judicial opinions that address fundamental issues about the governance and regulatory systems of agricultural biotechnology. This article summarizes these legal proceedings and describes their impact upon agricultural biotechnology. The article then provides a commentary and critique of the legal proceedings and resulting judicial opinions. INTRODUCTION Many courts around the world have issued judicial opinions about agricultural biotechnology. This author considers seven opinions, from seven different jurisdictions, as the most significant and consequential. In chronological order of issuing the opinion, these seven jurisdictions are New Zealand, the European Union, Kenya, Ghana, the Philippines, South Africa, and the United States. Each of these opinions decided whether modern techniques of molecular biology would be allowed or disallowed for crop breeding and crop improvement within that jurisdiction. These opinions also affect agricultural trade, though trade is not a significant focus of this article. Effectively, these opinions were deciding the future of agriculture for that jurisdiction. More broadly, each of these opinions is an important influence for the global debate about the future of agriculture.In Part One of this article, the author presents a summary of the litigation and judicial opinions. The author then provides an impact analysis of these opinions for going forward with agricultural biotechnology in that jurisdiction. Finally, the author explains the present status, as of May 2025, of agricultural biotechnology and its food and feed products for each of these seven jurisdictions.In Part Two, the author writes a commentary about these judicial opinions. The author critiques each of these judicial opinions and explores, from his pro agricultural biotechnology perspective, the deeper meanings and implications of these judicial opinions.
Keywords: agricultural biotechnology, Breeding, environment, Human health, Litigation, Judicial opinions, plant scientists
Received: 12 Mar 2025; Accepted: 07 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kershen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Drew Lloyd Kershen, College of Law, University of Oklahoma, Norman, United States
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