Foreword Article Swipe
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· 2016
· Open Access
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· DOI: https://doi.org/10.59962/9780774831802-002
· OA: W4385595034
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that 1 billion people go to bed hungry every night, almost 98 percent of them in the developing world.Climate change and population growth are predicted to make the situation much worse in the coming decades, but the crisis is already here.One billion hungry people is not acceptable: we must breed more nutritious, more resilient, and higher-yielding crops.Of course, better seeds are not the only solution to world hunger, but they are certainly one of our key weapons in the battle for a more foodsecure planet.Quantum leaps are required to enable farmers to grow more food on less land, with fewer inputs, and in increasingly challenging environmental conditions.And they have to occur quickly.Plant breeding needs to be accelerated, more efficient, and cheaper.Innovative solutions are clearly required.Like almost every other area in the life sciences, crop improvement is benefiting from the genomics revolution.Many in the agricultural research community believe that the latest large-scale, high-throughput genomics and phenomics approaches can deliver faster, better-targeted crop improvement.Much-needed innovations in crop improvement are set to emerge, many of them based on the principle of applying "omics" techniques to plant breeding.Decades' worth of basic genomics research are nearing fruition at last.Can it happen?What will it take?Certainly, and inevitably, more funding is needed.Sequencing a genome is the beginning, not the end.But one
