Paving the way towards future‐proofing our crops
Résumé
To meet the increasing global demand for food, feed, fibre and other plant- derived
products, a steep increase in crop productivity is a scientifically and technically
challenging imperative. The CropBooster- P project, a response to the H2020
call ‘Future proofing our plants’, is developing a roadmap for plant research to
improve crops critical for the future of European agriculture by increasing crop
yield, nutritional quality, value for non- food applications and sustainability.
However, if we want to efficiently improve crop production in Europe and pri-
oritize methods for crop trait improvement in the coming years, we need to take
into account future socio- economic, technological and global developments, in-
cluding numerous policy and socio- economic challenges and constraints. Based
on a wide range of possible global trends and key uncertainties, we developed
four extreme future learning scenarios that depict complementary future devel-
opments. Here, we elaborate on how the scenarios could inform and direct fu-
ture plant research, and we aim to highlight the crop improvement approaches
that could be the most promising or appropriate within each of these four future
world scenarios. Moreover, we discuss some key plant technology options that
would need to be developed further to meet the needs of multiple future learning
scenarios, such as improving methods for breeding and genetic engineering. In
addition, other diverse platforms of food production may offer unrealized poten-
tial, such as underutilized terrestrial and aquatic species as alternative sources of
nutrition and biomass production. We demonstrate that although several meth-
ods or traits could facilitate a more efficient crop production system in some of
the scenarios, others may offer great potential in all four of the future learning
scenarios. Altogether, this indicates that depending on which future we are head-
ing toward, distinct plant research fields should be given priority if we are to meet
our food, feed and non- food biomass production needs in the coming decades.
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