Stress resilience in crop plants: strategic thinking to address local food production problems

There are many ways to assess or define the stress resilience of crop production, but ultimately the resilience of systems (and communities), i.e., an ability to survive and prosper, is driven by profitability. Here, we review challenges for those who seek to bring about beneficial change in practice or policy as we translate novel crop science research findings into impacts on the food supply chain. While advances in plant and crop science are relevant to this challenge, the context of application is crucial here and this will mean that many other considerations, discussed below, will potentially moderate the impact on crop growth and yield of what could be the introduction of very significant breakthroughs in genetic gain This paper considers opportunities for plant scientists seeking to address the world’s growing food security challenge by exploiting new understanding of the basis of crop stress resilience. Ultimately the local challenge is to increase the resilience of cropping systems and rural communities. Even though advances in plant and crop science understanding have helped us make considerable progress toward meeting the foodrelated Millennium Development Goals and the more recent Sustainable Development Goals, there is still a very significant “Global Food Security Challenge.” This is a multidisciplinary challenge which depressingly now also involves a necessity to address the fact that for the first time in history, there are more obese people in the world than there are hungry people. We recognize that both hunger and obesity are promoting significant health problems associated with unhealthy and/or inadequate diets. While stress resilience is of less relevance to those addressing this set of issues, stress effects on crop and food quality can be appreciable and there are opportunities here for crop science to deliver change for the better. We need to increase the availability of food in many regions of the world and also increase peoples’ access to this food but the food should also be healthy. There are many social cultural and economic considerations that contribute to local differences in food availability. These considerations can be captured effectively in the following identity ORIGINAL RESEARCH