Genetic Improvement of Rice for Food Security and Sustainable Development, Achievements and Challenges
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The world’s population is increasing alarmingly, accounting for about 8.6 billion by mid 2030. The growing population has brought limitation in land use, resulting in rampant environmental degradation bringing down natural ecosystem and resulting in climate change and food insecurity and poverty. Rice is the staple food of more than half of the world's population. However, the increasing temperature and drought have affected the crop production adversely around the world. The idea of smart mutant plants could be a boon in this regard bringing a solution for food insecurity and poverty. In plant breeding programs, mutation breeding is one of the oldest methods. Currently, mutation breeding has become popular among the breeders and scientists. Genetic variation is the sole aim in this technique and plant breeders are focused to, the recombination and independent assortment of alleles, to obtain new individuals from the population. IR64 is a mega rice variety known for higher yield, early maturity and disease resistance but susceptible to drought stress, resulting in considerable yield reductions. The desired characteristics of high yield under the stressed condition in IR64 can be brought through exposing the variety to mutation breeding approach is discussed in this article.