ABSTRACT
Crop production is central to human survival, and production of increased quantities of food is an ad innitum necessity to sustain current and future global populations. Agricultural crops provide nearly 70%–80% of calories and 60%–70% of all proteins consumed by human beings. Of the approximately 50,000 plant species that are edible, less than 50 are used, of which only 15 supply 90% of the world’s food, and just 3-wheat, rice, and maize-supply 60% of human food, making the world agricultural system very vulnerable and nonresilient. There are also pressures of increased demand for nonfood usage of agricultural products, for example, biofuels. One of the underlying causes of the unprecedented increases in food prices in 2008 was biofuels that were produced from grains (e.g., maize) and used to substitute bioenergy for fossil fuel energy to mitigate climate change. The increased food prices pushed the number of people going to bed hungry to more than 1 billion, most of them in developing countries.
