The scientific journal Agriculture & Food Security has just published "Re-orienting crop improvement for the changing climatic conditions of the 21st century" by C. Mba, E.P. Guimarães and K. Ghosh. The paper underscores that plant breeding must be re-oriented in order to generate 'smart' crop varieties that yield more with fewer inputs. It highlights some of the current plant breeding techniques that hold great promise for crop improvement, including marker-assisted selection, targeting induced local lesions in genomes (TILLING), genetic modification, as well as emerging biotechnologies of relevance to plant breeding such as zinc finger nuclease, oligonucleotide directed mutagenesis, synthetic genomics, etc. The paper also recommends adequate policies to enable plant breeding, training of a new generation of plant breeders, establishment of partnerships (including public-private sector synergies), adoption of the continuum approach to the management of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture as means to improved cohesion of the components of its value chain, and strengthening the national agricultural research and extension systems of developing countries. See http://www.agricultureandfoodsecurity.com/content/pdf/2048-7010-1-7.pdf (350 KB) or contact [email protected] for more information.