Plant breeding is the science of changing the traits of plants in order to produce desired characteristics. It has been used to improve the quality of nutrition in products for humans and animals. The goals of plant breeding are to produce crop varieties that boast unique and superior traits for a variety of applications. The most frequently addressed agricultural traits are those related to biotic and abiotic stress tolerance, grain or biomass yield, end-use quality characteristics such as taste or the concentrations of specific biological molecules and ease of processing.
The Yecoro wheat (right) cultivar is sensitive to salinity, plants resulting from a hybrid cross with cultivar W4910 (left) show greater tolerance to high salinity
In vitro-culture of Vitis (grapevine), Geisenheim Grape Breeding Institute
Agricultural research on potato plants
Modern facilities in molecular biology are now used in plant breeding.
Food security is the state of having reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food. The availability of food for people of any class, gender or religion is another element of food security. Similarly, household food security is considered to exist when all the members of a family, at all times, have access to enough food for an active, healthy life. Individuals who are food-secure do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. Food security includes resilience to future disruptions of food supply. Such a disruption could occur due to various risk factors such as droughts and floods, shipping disruptions, fuel shortages, economic instability, and wars. Food insecurity is the opposite of food security: a state where there is only limited or uncertain availability of suitable food.
A woman selling produce at a market in Lilongwe, Malawi
Number of people affected by undernourishment in 2010–12 (by region, in millions)
A Kenyan woman farmer at work in the Mount Kenya region
Goats are an important part of the solution to global food security because they are fairly low-maintenance and easy to raise and farm.