Plant Biotechnology and GMOs

During the last century, world population rose from 1.6 to 6 billion creating huge challenges for agriculture to satisfy the increased demands for food. However, new technologies increased crop yields dramatically so the predicted catastrophic starvation and resulting conflicts did not occur. There are still serious challenges to be faced. World population is anticipated to rise to 10 billion by 2050. Freshwater, vital for agricultural productivity, is becoming scarce and climate change could increase temperature, drought, and uncertainty. New crop varieties need to be developed quickly to meet these challenges and biotechnology will be needed to enhance existing technologies to achieve this. So far, biotechnology has been successfully used to develop insect and herbicide resistance in a limited number of crops. In the future, the actual metabolism of the crop plants will be altered to produce new products and tolerance against environmental stresses. In addition, the nutritional value of crops such as rice will be enhanced. Crops will also be used to harvest the sun for biofuels to replace fossil fuels and reduce the emission of CO 2 . Some of these new crop plants are already in field trials and will be available to farmers in the near future.