Perspectives World food security deteriorated very sharply in the 1960’s when developing countries like India, Pakistan, and Indonesia were desperately short of food grains. Fortunately, agricultural scientists responded with a new production technology, which has popularly been described as “Green Revolution Technology.” This helped to avoid large-scale starvation for around 40 years. However, the food security problem has again seen a major deterioration in the last few years; food prices are rising sharply and once again the poor people of the world are threatened
with serious malnutrition. The underlining causes that drove to food security deterioration, i.e. rising fuel and fertilizer prices, climate change related erratic rain falls, sudden and severe drought conditions, excessive floods, divert of food grains into bio-fuel production, will remain for the years to come. Food security will even get worse since population is still growing while no significant expansion of arable lands is foreseen. FAO estimates that world food production should increase by more than 75% in the next 30 years to feed about eight billion people by 2025 [38]. Therefore, a new “Green Revolution” is desperately needed to solve the food security issue in the years to come. The massive advent of plant molecular biology is anticipated to provide a sound solution to further increase food production by both increasing yield potential and stability. In this regard, induced mutagenesis is gaining importance in plant molecular biology as a tool to identify and isolate genes, and to study their structure and function. Several papers in this book report the progress being made in this area. Recently mutation techniques have also been integrated with other molecular technologies, such as molecular marker techniques or high throughput mutation screening techniques; mutation techniques are becoming more powerful and effective in breeding crop varieties. Mutation breeding is entering into a new era: molecular mutation breeding. Therefore, induced mutations will continue to play a significant role for improving world food security in the coming years and decades