Scientists, faced with the major challenge of boosting productivity of staple crops for ensuring world’s food and nutritional security, are now looking at effectively deploying biotechnological tools to develop crops which would not be transgenics or genetically modified (GM) ones.

 Transgenics or GM crops, they say, have generated much controversy across the globe. It has to pass through rigorous regulatory process before commercial release and hence it’s time consuming. Rather the better option would be to deploy biotechnological tools like marker-aided selection, molecular characterisation, exploitation of apomatic genes, allele mining, harnessing heterosis, pyramiding of rice genes to develop a range of high yielding non-GM crops.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation has already sounded the alarm bell that the global demand for rice would increase by another 200 million tonne by 2025 and scientists have taken up this challenge seriously.

However, scientists at the recently concluded 2nd International Rice Congress in New Delhi were of the view that no major technological breakthrough is in sight that would increase rice yield. A major technological breakthrough means increasing the photosynthesis in rice (C3 crop) to the level of that in maize, sorghum and sugarcane (C4 crop).

In a major rice producing country like India, the annual rate of growth in output of this staple crop has tapered off to a level lower than the annual increase in population growth of 1.8 per cent. “Though the yield potential of rice is 10 tonne per hectare, farmers on the average still harvest five tonne per hectare. To close this gap, we must develop varieties with more durable resistance to disease, insects and tolerance to abiotic stress,” says a noted plant breeder and World Food Prize recipient, Gurudev Kush.

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