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Feeding the world in the twenty-first century

The gains in food production provided by the Green Revolution have reached their ceiling while world population continues to rise. To ensure that the world's poorest people do not still go hungry in the twenty-first century, advances in plant biotechnology must be deployed for their benefit by a strong public-sector agricultural research effort.

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Figure 1
Figure 2: Biotechnology products of value in developing countries.

a, Courtesy of M. Jones; b, Courtesy of I. Potrykus and P. Beyer; c, Courtesy of L. Herrera Estrella.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Lipton, S. Dryden, R. May and colleagues at the Rockefeller Foundation for comments on an earlier draft of this article.

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Conway, G., Toenniessen, G. Feeding the world in the twenty-first century. Nature 402 (Suppl 6761), C55–C58 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/35011545

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