Prospective of agriculture biotechnology to minimize hunger and malnutrition
Author(s): Yogendra Singh
Abstract: Over active nature of human being is affecting the environment of earth in adverse manner. This is leading a threat to global sustainable agriculture development and ultimately food security. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) defines "food security" as a state of affairs where all people at all times have access to safe and nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life. This means that in order to enjoy food security, there must be on the one hand a provision of safe, nutritious, and quantitatively and qualitatively adequate food and, on the other, rich and poor, male and female, old and young must have access to it. “Green Revolution “has been one of the greatest achievements since the Second World War. The phenomenal increase of research based agricultural productivity has fed millions and served as the basis of economic transformation in many poor countries, especially on the Indian subcontinent. This "Green Revolution" has avoided dire predictions of death and famine in world particularly in Asia. But in present scenario agriculture land is decreasing continually, due to vast industrialization, there is continuous degradation of soil health by improper agriculture practices, and simultaneously there is drastic shift in population from rural area to urban area. All this is creating problems of hunger and malnutrition in developing countries. As Biotechnology science has given us a new tool to maintain food security. Conventional breeding, widely used during the Green Revolution era, no longer provides needed breakthroughs in yield potentials, nor the solution to the complex problems of pests, diseases, and drought stress. On other hand various components of Biotechnology i.e. Plant Tissue Culture, Marker Assisted Breeding, Genetic Engineering, has enormous potential to achieve the goal of to minimize Hunger and malnutrition as well as make the complex agricultural systems of world more productive and sustainable.
