Abstract

The unprecedented global climate change has severely impacted our environment and engendered severe threats to agricultural productivity (Shahzad et al., 2021; Cinner et al., 2022; Ozdemir, 2022). This has led to the emergence of new races of plant pathogens and insect pests, accentuated abiotic stresses, depleted water resources and shrunken arable land, posing grave challenges to the food security of an ever-increasing global population (IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, 2022). The advantages offered by the Green Revolution of the mid-1960s are also fading away, resulting in a fragile food system (Davis et al., 2019; John and Babu 2021). Agriculture today faces newer challenges exacerbated by genetic erosion, the narrow genetic base of commercial crops and environmental degradation. There is an urgent need to make agriculture more resilient and sustainable while still continuing to develop high-yielding, stress-resistant and climate-smart crop varieties.