ABSTRACT
By 2025, the human population is predicted to increase to a staggering number of more than 8 billion from the present figure of 6 billion. In the last 50 years, the increase has been doubled, the increment almost entirely confined to the developing countries. Due to human interference, the planet's ecological carrying capacity has been steadily shrinking. The two trends combined have made food security more precarious than ever before in human history. Besides food security, malnutrition due to lack of balanced food is another formidable problem. According to a recently published statistics by FAO, nearly 800 million of the world populations
suffer from malnutrition. According to the same source4 of information, the gap between intake of food and malnutrition will substantially decrease within the next decade but there will still be 680 million (13%) people suffering from chronic malnutrition. In the backdrop of the existing situation, the obvious solution lies in the production of more food-both in quantity and quality, utilizing the inhospitable landmass, now consi dered to be unsuitable for any crop cultivation. This chapter discusses the manner in which some of recent technologies developed in the postgenomic era may contribute to ease the global food situation, providing food not only to the increasing populace but also save them from under nourishment and immunizing them against deadly diseases such as hepatitis B through genetically-modified (GM) food containing vaccines.
