This book features a comprehensive foresight assessment, exploring the pressures — threats as well as opportunities — on the global agriculture & food systems between now and 2050. The overarching aim is to help readers understand the context, by analyzing global trends and anticipating change for better planning and constructing pathways from the present to the future by focusing on the right questions and problems. The book contextualizes the role of international agricultural research in addressing the complex challenges posed by UN 2030 Agenda and beyond, and identifies the decisions that scientific leaders, donors and policy makers need to take today, and in the years ahead, to ensure that a global population rising to nine billion or more combined with rising incomes and changing diets can be fed sustainably and equitably, in the face of the growing climate threats.

Subsistence production: a sign of market failure. Commercialization cannot be left to the market. Household effects of commercialization. Nutrition effects of commercialization. Policy action needed.

This book caters to the need of researchers working in the ever-evolving field of agricultural biotechnology. It discusses and provides in-depth information about latest advancements happening in this field. The book discusses evolution of plant tissue culture techniques, development of doubled haploids technology, role of recombinant-DNA technology in crop improvement. It also provides an insight into the global status of genetically modified crops, use of RNAi technology and mi-RNAs in plant improvement. Chapters are also dedicated for different branches of ‘omics’ science including genomics, bioinformatics, proteomics, metabolomics and phenomics along with the use of molecular markers in tagging and mapping of various genes/QTLs of agronomic importance. This book also covers the role of enzymes and microbes in agriculture in productivity enhancement. It is of interest to teachers, researchers of biotechnology and agriculture scientists. Also the book serves as additional reading material for undergraduate and postgraduate students of biotechnology, agriculture, horticulture, forestry, ecology, soil science, and environmental sciences. National and international biotechnologists and agricultural scientists will also find this to be a useful read.