Designing the Crops for the Future; The CropBooster Program

Abstract

The realization of the full objectives of international policies targeting global food security and climate change mitigation, including the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Climate Agreement COP21 and the European Green Deal, requires that we (i) sustainably increase the yield, nutritional quality and biodiversity of major crop species, (ii) select climate-ready crops that are adapted to future weather dynamic and (iii) increase the resource use efficiency of crops for sustainably preserving natural resources. Ultimately, the grand challenge to be met by agriculture is to sustainably provide access to sufficient, nutritious and diverse food to a worldwide growing population, and to support the circular bio-based economy. Future-proofing our crops is an urgent issue and a challenging goal, involving a diversity of crop species in differing agricultural regimes and under multiple environmental drivers, providing versatile crop-breeding solutions within wider socio-economic-ecological systems. This goal can only be realized by a large-scale, international research cooperation. We call for international action and propose a pan-European research initiative, the CropBooster Program, to mobilize the European plant research community and interconnect it with the interdisciplinary expertise necessary to face the challenge.

Keywords: CO2; biodiversity; bioeconomy; breeding; climate change; crop yield; food supply; photosynthesis; resource use efficiency; sustainability.

Figure 1

Plant traits are a key part of our agricultural systems, which underpin food, feed biomaterial and biofuel systems and in turn form the foundation of societies and economies. Our current agricultural and food/feed/fiber/fuel systems are both driving and exposed to a number of key threats that endanger their future. Likewise, the need to meet the sustainable development goals creates rising demands on our agri-food/feed/fiber/fuel systems to produce more and do so more sustainably. Plant trait innovation provides a means for future-proofing plants against the threats, and helping future-proof agriculture such that it can help deliver the SDGs.