CropsBiotechnology in Plant Production and Protection Agriculture is expected to feed an increasing human population, forecast to reach 8 000 million by 2020, of whom 6 700 million will be in the developing countries. Although the rate of population growth is steadily decreasing, the increase in absolute numbers of people to be fed may be such that the carrying capacity of agricultural lands could soon be reached given current technology. The technological challenge is to obtain this agricultural productivity improvement without destroying the global natural resource base. New technologies, such as biotechnology, if properly focused, offer a responsible way to enhance agricultural crop productivity for now and the future. The main biotechnological applications in crop biotechnology include tissue culture, marker-assisted selection and transgenic technology. Tissue culture includes micropropagation; embryo rescue; plant regeneration from callus and cell suspension; and protoplast, anther and microspore culture, which are used particularly for large-scale plant multiplication. Micropropagation has proved especially useful in producing high quality, disease-free planting material of a wide range of crops. Tissue culture also provides the means to overcome reproductive isolating barriers between distantly related wild relatives to crops through embryo rescue and in vitro fertilisation or plant protoplast fusions. Molecular marker technology is useful for assisting and speeding up selection through conventional breeding. It is a powerful method for identifying the genetic basis of traits and is used to construct linkage maps to locate particular genes that determine beneficial traits. Using molecular markers, genetic maps of great detail and accuracy have been developed for many crop species. Markers are particularly useful for analysing the influence of complex traits like plant productivity and stress tolerance and are being employed to develop suitable cultivars of the major crops. Generation of genetically modified trangenic plants with a range of added traits, uses advanced recombinant DNA techniques including genetic engineering and cloning. Several transgenic cultivars of major food crops, such as soybeans, maize, canola, potatoes and papayas, have been commercially released incorporating genes for resistance to herbicides, insects and viruses. It is estimated that the global area planted with transgenic crops has risen from 1.7 million hectares in 1996 to 44.2 million hectares in 2000 (ISAAA, 2000). Crop improvement continues to benefit from advances in plant molecular biology and genomics. The completion of the genome sequence of the mustard (Arabidopsis thaliana) and rice and the continuing work on functional genomics has tremendous direct benefits both for dicotyledons and monocotyledons. The increase in understanding of gene regulation and expression will allow crops to be modified to provide food, fiber, medicine and fuel as well as tolerance to environmental stresses. The tools are in place to meet future food demand through increases in crop productivity with less land and water to meet the demand of the population increase. It is however, important to recognise that possible environmental risks can be caused by transgenic gene escape and genetic erosion and new products of biotechnology, mainly involving genetically modified crops, have raised such concerns. Adequate biosafety regulations, risk assessment of transgenic crops and establishment and compliance with appropriate mechanisms and instruments for monitoring use are needed to ensure that there will be no harmful effects on the environment or for the users. Relevant Documents:
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Background Document to Conference 1 of the FAO Biotechnology Forum, entitled 
