Profound changes can be witnessed nowadays in our approach to the life sciences. Over the last twenty years enormous advances have been made in plant biotechnology, and the science of molecular plant breeding has evolved. Plant biotechnology is a worthy continuation of the green revolution that helped overcome famine in the second half of the twentieth century by increasing plant productivity and introducing up-to-date farm management not only in the Great Pannonian Region but everywhere in the world. Due to the social and economic pressures a compromise has been made between the need to increase food production and the maintenance of an equilibrium in the natural environment. Nobody is surprised nowadays by the fact that the number of undernourished people in the world has declined from half of mankind 50 years ago to 13-15% at present, while the world population has increased two and a half times. 

Despite the results achieved in the course of the green revolution, the limitations of the modern technologies introduced in agriculture in the developed world over the last fifty years were already becoming perceptible by the end of the 20th century, underlining the need for a new period of innovation. The quantity of mineral fertiliser and pesticides can no longer be increased without risking environmental damage to soils and subsurface waters in the Great Pannonian Region. The quantity of water that can be used for irrigation in agriculture is an even bigger problem. It has now become quite clear that the green revolution contributed to a substantial increase in plant productivity, however we have to find new solutions when we launch bioenergy crop production programmes.

Conventional methods and the technologies used up to now will not be sufficient to achieve future aims, which will require the application of new techniques. Adapting the results achieved in molecular biology for use in breeding could be an effective answer to new challenges. Classical plant breeders have long dreamt of stabilising crop yields. In the last century attempts to achieve this aim by breeding modern varieties led to two phenomenons: the reduction of heterogeneity within the population, aimed at producing modern varieties with a homogeneous population, resulted in gene erosion, while alleles responsible for adaptation traits became accumulated in the course of the breeding cycles, leading to a considerable improvement in the adaptability of the plants and in their resistance to biotic and abiotic stress factors. Instead of landraces with specific adaptability to a given region, modern daylength-insensitive varieties have broad adaptability and can be grown over wider areas.

Plant breeders will only be able to achieve their aims for the future if they succeed in developing genotypes suited to knowledge-based agricultural production. It means that, instead of increasing inputs in order to achieve higher yields and greater stability, plant varieties developed using molecular genetic and breeding methods will replace technologies representing a potential danger to the environment and to human health. The new challenges that this will involve can very probably be met by means of integrated plant breeding, amalgamating conventional and molecular breeding methods.

In addition to their scientific convictions, modern plant breeders must also take public opinion into account when elaborating a research concept. The magnificent results achieved in feeding the world population over the last fifty years are completely disregarded by certain extremists, who can only see the supposedly negative sides of the green revolution, such as the use of chemicals that are potentially dangerous to the environment. This is particularly true in the case of gene technology, where consumer opinions are most divided in the European region. As a consequence, European plant breeders are at a relative disadvantage compared to other regions in the application of gene technology methods. According to a survey carried out in 2000 (Arundel et al. 2000), European breeders are doing their best to make up for lost time.

It is now quite clear that agricultural production underwent both enormous development and radical transformation during the second half of the 20th century. There are also signs that a new era is just beginning. One of the most important preconditions for an efficient food industry are participation in innovative processes. There can be no question of returning to the conditions prevailing prior to the green revolution, which must itself be superceded in the future. Development will be driven by the demands of society, so modern plant breeding is likely to become an important tool for use in the agriculture of the Great Pannonian Region.