BIOTECHNOLOGY – NEW PERSPECTIVES FOR FUTURE CROP PRODUCTION

Our world changes quickly.
We are all part of this process.
Our knowledge base increases dramatically, new technologies are developing.
Hopes of experts and fears of consumers meet head to head – day to day – and the media love it.
This is the information age.
The economy grows beyond boundaries knowing no frontiers anymore.
The limited leverage of politics will require new tools of power.
Change has become our most consistent partner.
The impact of new media penetrates our lives, bodies and brains – it impacts us – the essence of being human is affected – thinking, executing, killing hopes of others, their plans, their business, their credits, their foods and flowers.
Our lives change fast, and this happens globally with ever-increasing force – but it will not hurt people, will it?

According to many calculations, world population will double from 6 billion to 12 billion people in the next 50 years.
Considering this, there will be a need of doubling food production within this living generation – until our children are grown up.
This is the first generation to which this happens in one lifetime.
In the first two decades of this new millennium, we will need more food than humanity required in all 10 000 years before.
The per capita consummation will double as well as, with growing affluence, the hunger for meat will go up.
Agricultural hectars will go down while productivity will go up, less land and less water will need to produce more food.
Only 20 major food crops will need to feed the world, major crop failures and diseases will remain threatening – the five major crops are wheat, rice soybean, corn and rapeseed.

Solutions are not obvious, but may become available if trends continue.
Plant breeding has traditionally been very successful for many decades, modern extensions like marker assisted selection will continue to allow this to happen.
Gene mapping will be concluded for the major crops soon.
Gene transfer in case of directed recombination will increase the quality of future transgenics.
Yields will continue to go up, diseases and pests will not disappear but be controlled with chemical and biological means. In twenty years, there will be no major crop, which is not transgenic.
We do not need these solutions here in Europe, we neither depend on exporting food, nor would we need to import huge shipments of food, however, all other continents depend on this trade.
This is the reason why in “Novel Food affaires”, it is us against the rest of the world – with a few exceptions of some niche marketers.
We in Europe want to continue to have an abundance of good food available to us, all others will continue to sell it to us.

In this dramatic dispute related to global food matters, plant breeding will take centre-stage.
It never did in the eyes of the public in the past, however it will in the future.
The breeding process has changed for good, and nobody will turn this wheel back.
Genetic engineering is another technology, which significantly contributes to the toolbox of plant science.
Plant breeders may need to learn even more tricks how to improve breeding in the future.
Some dramatic examples of the new technologies will be given to describe a rounded perspective of future agricultural trends.

IV International Symposium on In Vitro Culture and Horticultural Breeding

M.M. Oelck

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2001.560.115