Raising crops for dry and saline lands: Challenges and the way forward

Abstract

Plants are continuously exposed to various environmental stresses. Of these, soil salinity and drought are considered to be the most important environmental stresses globally because they have a negative impact on plant growth and crop productivity. Drought and salinity thus threaten global food and nutritional security. The estimated annual global loss in crop production due to saline soils in irrigated areas is approximately US$27.3 billion (Qadir et al., 2014). Drought caused direct losses to the developing world's agriculture in the order of US$ 29 billion between 2005 and 2015 (FAO, 2018). Conversely, there is an increasing pressure to enhance agricultural production by 70% to feed a predicted increase in the world population of 9.7 billion by 2050. Hence, agriculture systems must become extremely productive and less wasteful throughout the world. Achieving this goal will be extremely challenging under the prevailing environmental conditions coupled with reductions in arable land and freshwater availability, together with climate change-induced environmental uncertainties. Over the past six decades, classical plant breeding technologies have played a major role in increasing crop performance and productivity. However, the consensus of scientific opinion is that most major crops have reached their maximum yield potential. Hence, the challenge for plant science is to develop improved crop varieties that can achieve sustainable higher yields with limited soil water availability and on saline soils. Recent developments in gene editing and innovative plant breeding technologies are crucial to the nature-based roadmap for sustainable agriculture intensification and climate resilience.