ABSTRACT
Globally humankind is facing a great challenge of achieving food security for the ever growing population and growing per capita incomes particularly in the emerging giant economies like Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The urgent need to decrease poverty and undernourishment while protecting the environment means delicately balancing development and sustainability resulting in increased additional pressure on the global food production system. In the foreseeable future agriculture will continue to be the backbone of economies in Africa and South Asia in spite of growing incomes and urbanization, globalization, and the declining contribution of agricultural income to gross domestic product (GDP) of the developing (in sub-Saharan Africa with 35% contribution to GDP agriculture employs 70% population) as well as emerging economies like India (with 18% contribution to GDP agriculture employs 65% population). In the past 40 years, increased crop productivity with adoption of new technologies and increased agricultural inputs along with expansion of agricultural land by about 20-25% has enabled an extraordinary progress in food security and nutrition level (FAO 2002). In 2009, more than one billion people went undernourished not because there is not enough food, but people are too poor to buy food. The percentage of hungry people in the developing world had been dropping for decades (Figure 2.1) even though the number of hungry worldwide barely dipped. The food price crises in 2008 reversed these decades of gains made in the area of food production and security (Nature 2010).
