Journal of Food Nutritional Disorders International Publisher of Science, Technology and Medicine Averting an Imminent Food Crisis: The Need for Alternative Crops

that the estimated world human population is expected to increase from 2.5 billion in the 1990s to 8.5 billion by 2025 and projected to 9.2 billion by 2050 (Figure 1, Table 1). These estimates having always been associated with the challenges of environmental sustenance and food supply now show that food production must increase by 60-70 % in order to meet world demand and to minimize malnutrition [2]. How will this increase be realized? Would this achievement be different from the promise of the 1990s? The promise of the 1990s which emanated from the projected food crisis then, produced an agricultural revolution that was built on improved crop varieties, better equipment and farm mechanization, cultivation of more land, as well as increased fertilizer use for optimum growth. This was shown to improve the condition and wellbeing of a lot of rural dwellers particularly in the developing countries where adoption of improved maize varieties was shown to significantly improve food security and alleviate poverty among rural households, while adoption of (improved) groundnut varieties significantly increased the net value of income [3,4]. Furthermore, recent advances in plant improvement includin