**9. GM crops for food security**

With the current population growth, it is expected that the world population will reach 9 billion by 2050 and current food production rate is not sufficient to feed the future population [67]. On top of that, 40% of the total arable land of the world is lost over the last 40 years because of erosion and pollution. Heavy utilization of arable lands reduces organic matter and nutrients from the soil; therefore, farmers need to rely on heavy fertilizer input to reintroduce nutrients in the soil for better crop yield [68]. In addition to heavy input of synthetic fertilizers, farmers also need to rely on insecticides and pesticides as every year farmers face 20–30% due to insects, animals, and weeds [69, 70]. Therefore, the most sustainable way to ensure food security is to develop high yielding, enhanced product quality, disease resistance and climate resilient crop varieties. Plant breeders try to develop new superior plant varieties; however, it is limited by the huge number of crosses needed to be done, prolonged and labor intense selection process, transfer of undesired genes with the desired ones, random combination of genes from two parents and so on [71]. In contrast, GM crops are developed by incorporating only the desired gene/s in the target crop, even from a distantly related organism, in a shorter period of time and in more precise manner. GM crops have a lot more to offer than the conventionally developed varieties. Biotech crops are already proven to be more economically beneficial as it requires less chemical input such as herbicide tolerant and insect tolerant GM crops. GM crops are the fastest adopting technology in the world. If farmers have not decided to cultivate GM crops, in order to obtain present day crop yield, we would have needed an additional 13 million hectares of land [72]. This amount of land would come at the cost of destroying rainforests which would eventually increase carbon emission. Most of the biotech crops are cost saving and some are with higher yield capacity. As a result, the farmers are getting more return from the GM crops [73]. GM crops have all the potential to achieve food security, however, lack of societal acceptance of GM crops is the major obstacle as many farmers fear that if they grow GM crops then consumers may not buy it. Also, most of the people mistrusts the benefits of GM crops because they think GM crops are actually harmful, but developers of new GM technologies and GM varieties hides for profit [68]. In real life, this is not the case. Thousands of studies are present that showed GM crops are not harmful at all. It is the duty of the scientific community to make general people understand the science and safety of the GM crops in an easier and clearer manner.
