Challenges of food security in Africa in the face of climate change: potential of the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-cas9 technology to address these challenges

Climate change is the key factor that influences food security in Africa. Essentially, it has contributed to a great increase in drought stress, flooding, salinity, land degradation, sliding and soil erosion. Because of the effect of climate change, plant pests and diseases have also become another significant obstacle to the agricultural development in Africa. Consequently, Africa's food production and supply system is becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change. As such, Africa needs to opt for new ways to support their traditional breeding methods - the majority of which are no longer effective to handle and overcome the climatic challenges. The genome editing technology has become more useful in agriculture, especially after the recent discovery of the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats-associated endonuclease Cas9 (CRISPR-Cas9) system. Because of its simplicity, efficiency, and specificity, CRISPR-Cas9 has moved far beyond genetically modified (GM) technology to solve biotic and abiotic challenges, especially in developed countries. Through this technique, a variety of crops now produce site-specific alterations useful in crop production improvement. Several credible studies have brought out some encouraging results regarding the potential of this technique to address climate change in crop production. Despite its advantages in overcoming drought stress, salinity, flooding, pest and disease challenges in some developed countries, Africa is lagging behind in adopting and exploiting it effectively. It is a very small number of African nations that embrace and apply this technique to solve their climate-induced challenges in crop production. Technical, infrastructure, regulatory, policy and socio-economic factors are the primary causes of Africa's limited adoption of this technology. In order to accommodate this technology sufficiently, the African nations must improve their infrastructure and knowledge base while updating their policies and legal framework on gene editing. Finally, they ought to improve the capacity building and collaboration with nations possessing the technology to incorporate it into their food security strategies.