Biofortification Under Climate Change: The Fight Between Quality and Quantity
Climate change has been a serious problem in our industrialized world for the last century. We have faced its devastating effects on the environment, agriculture and human population. In current scenarios, around 3.8 billion people are predicted to live i
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Biofortification Under Climate Change: The Fight Between Quality and Quantity Amir Maqbool, Muhammad Abrar, Allah Bakhsh, Sevgi Çalışkan, Haroon Zaman Khan, Muhammad Aslam, and Emre Aksoy
Abstract Climate change has been a serious problem in our industrialized world for the last century. We have faced its devastating effects on the environment, agriculture and human population. In current scenarios, around 3.8 billion people are predicted to live in areas with severe water problems by 2025. As the majority of staple crops are sensitive to environmental fluctuations, only an increase in global temperatures by 2 °C can disrupt agricultural practices and crop production periods severely. Therefore, plant breeders have canalized all the efforts to enhance the grain yield and produce more crops under adverse environmental conditions to meet the demand of the ever-increasing human population. However, the majority of current staple crop varieties produce grains with insufficient micronutrients. Moreover, climate change decreases micronutrient uptake from the soil and translocation within the plant body. In this chapter, three strategies (agronomic, breeding and transgenics) of micronutrient biofortification in various staple crops are explained with recent successful examples. Keywords Abiotic stress · Agronomy · Breeding · Biofortification · Climate change · Genetic engineering
A. Maqbool · A. Bakhsh · E. Aksoy (*) Department of Agricultural Genetic Engineering, Faculty of Agricultural Sciences and Technologies, Niğde Ömer Halisdemir University, Niğde, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] M. Abrar · H. Z. Khan Department of Agronomy, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, Pakistan S. Çalışkan Department of Plant Production and Technologies, Faculty of Agricultural Sciences and Technologies, Niğde Ömer Halisdemir University, Niğde, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] M. Aslam Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, Pakistan © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Fahad et al. (eds.), Environment, Climate, Plant and Vegetation Growth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49732-3_9
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9.1 Introduction Most of the food scientists around the world are not exclusively focused to enhance food quantity but also centralized their attention to the quality, keeping in view the scenario of population explosion and nutritional demands of human beings and animals. In the past 50 years, research in agriculture has met Malthus’s challenge by increasing production as its central aim. However, the question arises, whether an increase in food quantity is enough to fulfill the demand for a healthy life. In the case of food, quality can be defined as the size, color, gloss, shape, taste, and nutritional value (density of vitamins and nutrients in the crop plants). In most of the developing countries, the main focus of research is to produce calorically dense staple crops, but the production of mic
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