The Research, Development, Commercialization, and Adoption of Drought and Stress-Tolerant Crops
Drought- and stress-tolerant crops will be one of the most significant factors to drive future agricultural productivity growth, by maintaining yields under suboptimal conditions, expanding production into marginal lands, and encouraging adoption of other
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The Research, Development, Commercialization, and Adoption of Drought and Stress-Tolerant Crops Gregory Graff, Gal Hochman and David Zilberman
1 The Importance of Stress-Tolerant Crops Global crop production tripled over five decades from 1960 to 2010 (Fig. 1.1). In the next four decades from 2010 to 2050, global crop production must double yet again if supply is to keep up with expected growth in demand. For not only is global population growing—with basic food requirements thus expanding proportionately—but the burgeoning middle classes of Asia, Latin America, and Africa are consuming ever more livestock products and processed foods, thus amplifying those populations’ demand for basic crop commodity output (Rosegrant et al. 2002). There is also growing demand for crops to produce biofuels, with numerous countries legislating ambitious renewable fuel standards (Rajagopal et al. 2007). These and other pressures have manifested in recent upward trends in agricultural commodity prices (Trostle 2008). Limited supplies and higher prices of food inevitably impact most the poorest and most food-insecure members of the human population, the billion or so who live on the equivalent of one or two dollars a day and spend a majority of their income on food, resulting in malnutrition, hunger, poor health, stunted growth, and entrapment in poverty. The greatest challenge in further increasing agricultural production, it is generally argued, is that agriculture already operates at or beyond the limits of available resources—including arable land, fresh water, energy inputs, carbon emissions, and the loading of excess nutrients and agrochemicals onto neighbouring and downstream ecosystems. Further expansions in agricultural production are not feasible,
G. Graff () Agricultural and Resource Economics, Colorado State University, B306 Clark Hall, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA e-mail: [email protected] G. Hochman Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA D. Zilberman Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA N. Tuteja, S. S. Gill (eds.), Crop Improvement Under Adverse Conditions, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-4633-0_1, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
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Fig. 1.1 Five decades of world crop production: 1960– 2010 (Gross Production Index Number (2004–2006 = 100). (Source: FAOStat 2011)
not economical, or increasingly likely to cause irreversible environmental impacts, such as species extinction and climate change (Tilman et al. 2002). Climate change, moreover, threatens to further complicate the challenge of a sustainable increase in agricultural production—given increasing temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns, increasing variability, and greater frequency and severity of extreme weather events. Such Malthusian views, however, are based on a linear conception of agricultural productivity growth and a static conceptualization of the nature of resource constraints. In the long run, the resource-use effic
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