By the end of this century, the average global temperature is predicted to rise due to the increasing release of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere. This change in climate can reduce agricultural yields, resulting in food insecurity. However, agricultural activities are one of the major contributors of GHGs and lower yields can trigger increased activity to meet the demand for food, resulting in higher quantities of GHGs released into the atmosphere. In this paper, we discuss the growth requirements and greenhouse gas release potential of staple cereal crops and assess the impact of climate change on their yields. Potential solutions for minimizing the influence of climate change on crop productivity are discussed. These include breeding to obtain cereals that are more tolerant to conditions caused by climate change, increased production of these new cultivars, improved irrigation, and more effective use of fertilizers. Furthermore, different predictive models inferred that climate change would reduce production of major cereal crops, except for millets due to their ability to grow in variable climatic conditions, and in dry areas due to a strong root system. Moreover, millets are not resource-intensive crops and release fewer greenhouse gases compared to other cereals. Therefore, in addition to addressing food security, millets have an enormous potential use for reducing the impact of agriculture on global warming and should be grown on a global scale as an alternative to major cereals and grains.
A growing population means an ever-increasing demand for food. This global concern has led to antagonism over resources such as water and soil. Climate change can directly influence the quality and availability of these resources, thereby adversely affecting our food systems and crop productivity, especially of major cereals such as rice, wheat and maize. In this review, we have looked at the availability of resources such as water and soil based on several modeling scenarios in different regions of the world. Most of these models predict that there will be a reduction in production rates of various cereal crops. Furthermore, all the major cereal crops are known to have a higher contribution to global warming than alternative crops such as millets which should be considered in mitigating global food insecurity. In this study, we have used the data to predict which regions of the world are most adversely affected by climate change and how the cultivation of millets and other crops could aid in the reduction of stress on environmental resources.
3 July 2015 in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition
With the turn of this century, novel food processing techniques have become commercially very important because of their profound advantages over the traditional methods. These novel processing methods tend to preserve the characteristic properties of food including their organoleptic and nutritional qualities better when compared with the conventional food processing methods. During the same period of time, there is a clear rise in the populations suffering from food allergies, especially infants and children. Though, this fact is widely attributed to the changing livelihood of population in both developed and developing nations and to the introduction of new food habits with advent of novel foods and new processing techniques, their complete role is still uncertain. Under the circumstance, it is very important to understand the structural changes in the protein as food is processed to comprehend whether the specific processing technique (conventional and novel) is increasing or mitigating the allergenicity. Various modern means are now being employed to understand the conformational changes in the protein which can affect the allergenicity. In this review, the processing effects on protein structure and allergenicity are discussed along with the insinuations of recent studies and techniques for establishing a platform to investigate future pathway to reduce or eliminate allergenicity in the population.