Food Security: Successes and Struggles of Impact-Focused Crop Improvement Projects

Dear Colleagues,

Breeders and growers, and agronomists, have done a tremendous job over the past decades to steadily increase production and crop yield per unit area, providing food for a global population which has doubled from four billion in 1974 to eight billion in 2023 – in less than a lifetime. The challenge we are facing now is how to continue growing sufficient, nutritious food for billions in a sustainable way - and produce it where it is needed.

There are large global imbalances in productivity. In addition to local climatic and soil conditions, this is at least partly due to lack of access and/or rate of application of fertilizer nutrients and agrochemicals for crop protection. Additional challenges now arise from climate change, which increases the severity and frequency of extreme weather events, such as heat, drought and floods. For each 1°C increase in average temperature, predicted yield losses of the main staples, rice, wheat and maize, are estimated between 3.1 - 7.4% (C. Zhao et al., 2017, PNAS).

Stress resilient crops are thus urgently needed, especially since we will not be able to hold global warming below the critical 1.5°C (IPPC). This means that life on earth will become more challenging for all of us and crop failure and yield losses will become more frequent and severe. Therefore, plant science and breeding have a tremendously important role to play in developing crops that are better adapted to climate extremes, more resistant to pests and diseases, and that make better use of nutrients.

The availability of genome sequences and sequence-based technologies, such as molecular markers or gene editing, as well as image-based, high-throughput phenotyping and speed-breeding are now available, holding promise to advance development of such future-proofed crop varieties.

However, whilst technologies advance in some countries, low-tech and low-cost breeding programs, especially in developing countries, continue to produce improved crop varieties often relying on germplasm provided by CGIAR centers, such as CIMMYT, ICRISAT, IRRI or CIAT, as a starting point.

To pay tribute to the enormous efforts and contributions by the many remarkable, dedicated individuals, as well as organizations, such as the CGIAR and Philanthropies, this special Plants issue is inviting articles highlighting small and big successes made towards food security and translation of science into the fields, as well as critical opinion papers and reviews on how we can do better.

Dr. Sigrid Heuer
Dr. Sean Mayes
Guest Editors

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