Not AvailableHuman exploitation of earth’s resources is leading to new problems day by day and hence newer
methods are devised to overcome the same. The long-term goal of crop improvement for abiotic stress
tolerance in plants is a traditional objective of breeders. World population is expected to increase by 1.8
billion as of 2030 and by 2.5 billion as of 2050, reaching 9.2 billion. By 2030 food demand is expected to
increase by 50 percent because of continued population growth and higher incomes (www.popcouncil.
org). If global population reaches 9.1 billion by 2050, the FAO says that world food production will
need to rise by 70 per cent, and food production in the developing world will need to double. On
the other hand food productivity is decreasing due to the effect of various abiotic stresses; therefore
minimizing these losses is a major area of concern for all nations to cope with the increasing food
requirements. However, abiotic stresses and climate change are becoming increasingly serious threats
to crop production worldwide at a time when food staple supply will need to be significantly higher to
meet the demand of the growing human population. Drought is the main abiotic factor followed by soil
salinity. Now-a-days, agriculture has new huge challenges due to population growth, the pressure on
agriculture liability on the environmental conservation, and climate change. To cope with these new
challenges, many plant breeding programs have reoriented their breeding scope to stress tolerance in
the last years. One such case is breeding for abiotic stress, utilizing even non arable land, to feed the ever increasing population. Research is the key to meeting the challenges of modern agriculture in a
sustainable and positive fashion. So, in this chapter, emphasis has been given on importance of abiotic
stresses specially on drought and salinity, sources of abiotic stress tolerance, genetics of abiotic stress
tolerance, plant breeding presents the conventional (selection and introduction, pedigree method,
modified bulk pedigree method, shuttle breeding, mutation breeding, diallele selective mating system
supplemented by MAS, back cross method and recurrent selection), and most recent advances and
discoveries (somaclonal approach, F1 anther culture, marker assisted selection and genetically modified
crop) applied to abiotic stresses, discussing the breeding methods, and modern molecular biological
approaches to develop improved cultivars tolerant to most sorts of abiotic stresses. In this chapter more
discussed about successful example of conventional breeding methods and non conventional methods
because the breeding procedure of each breeding methods is not possible in one chapter.Not Availabl
