Introduction to Improvement in Food Production

India's population has grown from about 350 million at Independence to well over a billion today, and even a well-managed farm cannot go on raising food output indefinitely by simply bringing more land under the plough -- most of the land that can be usefully cultivated is already in use. Meeting the food needs of a still-growing population therefore depends chiefly on raising the productivity of the land, the animals and the microorganisms already being used, rather than on cultivating more of it.

Biological science offers several broad, complementary routes to this goal, and this chapter takes up the two that work directly on plants and microorganisms (a companion route, animal husbandry, improves livestock and is covered separately within this same unit on Biology and Human Welfare).

Plant breeding

The oldest and still the most widely used route is plant breeding -- the deliberate, scientifically guided improvement of crop plants for higher yield, better quality, and greater resistance to disease, pests and adverse climate. India's own Green Revolution of the 1960s, built on high-yielding, disease-resistant, semi-dwarf varieties of wheat and rice, is the clearest large-scale demonstration of how much difference systematic plant breeding can make to a nation's food supply within a single generation.

Plant tissue culture

A newer, laboratory-based route is plant tissue culture, which exploits a basic property of plant cells -- totipotency, the capacity of even a single cell to regenerate an entire plant -- to multiply elite or disease-free plants rapidly, and to create novel plant types (through somatic hybridization and somaclonal variation) that classical cross-breeding alone cannot easily produce.

Single Cell Protein

A third, quite different route addresses the shortage of dietary protein directly, rather than growing more grain: Single Cell Protein (SCP), in which microorganisms are cultured on an industrial scale specifically as a rich, rapidly renewable source of protein for humans and livestock.

Together, plant breeding, tissue culture and Single Cell Protein form the biological toolkit this chapter covers for improving food production -- one route working on the whole plant across generations, one working at the level of the single totipotent cell, and one bypassing the crop plant altogether in favour of microorganisms.