White Paper describing the route to improved crop yields in Europe

The realisation of the full objectives of international policies targeting global food security and climate change mitigation, including the European Green Deal, United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris Climate Agreement COP21 and transition away from a fossil-carbon industrial base to one that is more bio-based, requires that we(i) sustainably increase the yield, nutritional quality, and biodiversity of major crop species,(ii) select climate-ready crops that are adapted to future weather dynamic and(iii) increase the resource use efficiency of crops to preserve natural resources, such as fresh water and phosphate and reducing the environmental burden arising from the application of nitrogenous fertiliser.Advanced scientific knowledge and tools for research and crop breeding already provide an excellent platform to build on. A long-term Strategic Research Agenda now needs to be agreed and priorities set to deliver blueprints for climate resilient future-proofed crops. This strategy should then be implemented through an innovative collaborative approach that combines the joint knowledge base of the research and industrial communities, with multi-stakeholder involvement and strong support from policy makers.This white paper has been compiled from contributions from several experts across the field of plant sciences. The CropBooster-P project has developed this strategic research agenda for a crop improvement programme that will provide the genetic innovation to improve and future proof our crop plants. It builds a strong collaboration between plant scientists and modellers, physicists, soil scientists, engineers and coders, biomathematicians, agronomists, plant breeders and farmers. The goal is to exploit the largely untapped genetic diversity that exists within the wild relatives and ancient and heirloom varieties of our crop plants to improve our crops so they will be more resilient, high yielding, resource efficient, nutritious, and ready for the future climate of Europe. The knowledge and technology to reach this goal springs from the transformative developments that have occurred in the last 20 years in genomics, phenomics, crop sciences, molecular plant sciences, agronomy, and plant breeding.