Innovations continuously enhance crop breeding and demand new strategic planning

Food security relies on continuous supplies of improved products from plant breeding and their assimilation into agriculture. Extraordinary innovations in the life sciences have brought plant breeding into a new phase of opportunity. These include the means to discover, manage and select better versus poorer versions of genes and the ability to change gene sequences in situ by gene editing. Genomics is also revealing the thousands of different microbes in all plants and the roles that their genomes play in determining crop traits that can be further improved by addition of the right microbes. Assimilation of such innovations into breeding strategies can have major impacts on rates of breeding gain but to achieve this will require comprehensive strategic leadership, planning and investments by scientists, leading global agencies and all governments based on appreciation of (i) the continuous streams of innovations underpinning crop improvement and (ii) the necessities for more rapid crop improvements everywhere to help avert otherwise inevitable catastrophes.