ABSTRACT
On October 12, 1990, Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), declared the birth of the world’s six billionth human in a hospital in Sarajevo, Bosnia. With this revelation, it was found that the world population had increased from five to six billion in only 12 years, while in the past, the world population had taken 13 years to escalate from four to five billion—clearly showing that the rate of population growth at that point had escalated so much that it had taken one year less to increase the population count by one billion than before. It is expected that the total world population will increase from 7.32 billion in 2015 to 9.99 billion in the year 2060. One of the major issues associated with an increasing population is the production of sufficient quantities of food. Towards this end, an increase in cultivation acreage, use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the cultivation of high-yield varieties are a few measures that have been implemented so as to increase the food production. However, these methods display certain limitations, such as the limited available land area that can be used for cultivation and the safety issues associated with the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Therefore, plant breeding scientists have started to employ genetic engineering techniques for the efficient production of new species.
