Global food production needs to increase by 70 per cent by 2050 in order to feed an additional 2.3 billion people. Food production in developing countries needs to almost double. Production will not need to grow as fast as in previous decades because of the slowdown in population growth rates, but incomes are growing, and the volume requirements are still remarkable: for instance, an additional one billion tonnes of cereals and 200 million tonnes of meat will need to be produced annually by 2050.

In developing countries, 80 per cent of the production increases are projected to come from increases in yields and cropping intensity and only 20 per cent from the expansion of arable land. In land-scarce countries, almost the whole of the production increases would be achieved through yield improvement. But the fact is that globally, the rate of growth in yields of the major cereal crops has been steadily declining. The rate of growth in global cereal yields, for example, dropped from 3.2 per cent per year in 1960 to 1.5 per cent in 2000.

The challenge for technology is to reverse this decline, given that a continuous linear increase in yields at a global level following the pattern established over the past five decades would not be sufficient to meet food needs.

Plant breeding techniques, particularly modern biotechnology, have aroused large public debates in the last decade. Technically speaking, modern biotechnology has the potential to speed up the development of improved crops, which may increase yields and/or decrease crop losses. For instance, marker-assisted selection increases the efficiency of conventional plant breeding by allowing rapid laboratory-based analysis of thousands of seedlings without the need to grow plants to maturity in the field.

Tissue culture techniques allow the rapid multiplication of clean planting materials of vegetative propagated species for distribution to farmers. Genetic engineering can help to transfer desired traits between plants more quickly and accurately than it is possible with conventional plant breeding. Genetic engineering for biotic stress and herbicide resistance has been shown to be successful in some cases: it has permitted to reduce pesticide applications and has lifted yield of crops subject to insect attack.

Engineered herbicide tolerance in soybeans, maize and canola has facilitated conservation tillage and permitted more-timely planting with modest benefits for yields. Further yield improvements by using genetically modified crops that are stress resistant are seen by some experts as a good possibility for bridging yield gaps.

Some experts also predict that by 2050 genetically modified technologies would be cheaper, far more widely available and used to a much greater extent to improve potential yields and yield stability of staple food crops. Nonetheless, it has to be recognised that genetically modified crops, and particularly transgenic modification, carry risks and arouse widespread public concerns in many countries.