Crop Wild Relatives to Combat Global Warming: A Critical Analysis

This book analyses how Crop Wild Relatives (CWRs) can combat the challenges of food security, which is increasingly threatened by global warming. CWRs are closely related to field crops, and have the potential to benefit crop improvement through providing resistance to an array of biotic and abiotic stresses, and enriching the gene pool, leading to enhanced plant yield and aiding humanity’s quest to meet the ever-growing needs of a burgeoning population. CWRs also have tremendous potential to sustain and enhance global food security, thereby contributing enormously to humanity’s wellbeing. Therefore, their search, characterization and conservation in crop breeding programs assumes great importance. Viewed against recent global climate upheavals, the task becomes all the more important. Against the backdrop of disastrous climate effects, such as the alarming environmental hazards of highly soil-extractive farming, euphemistically known as the “green revolution” of the 1960s, the task assumes much significance.