| Résumé | Cereal grains provide approximately 56 percent of the energy in the human diet. The major cereal crops wheat, rice and corn along with barley, oats, sorghum, rye and millets, form the backbone of international agriculture. A 2.2% annual increase in cereal production has been achieved over the last two decades (1970-1990). However, in the early nineties, world cereal production has remained steady around 1.94 billion Mt per year (FAO Quarterly Bulletin of Statistics, 1994). Meanwhile, the world population is expected to be 6. 35 billion by the year 2000, an increase of almost 50% from 1975. This highlights the need for increased world production of cereals.
Among the cereals, rice and wheat are used as a staple food by the majority of humans. Since the beginning of civilization wheat has been domesticated and its cultivation has spread as human beings have settled into new lands. Wheat improvement gained momentum in the late fifties and early sixties and since then considerable increases in the yield of wheat have been achieved. This resulted in an increase in the worldwide stocks of wheat as compared to the global consumption in the seventies, eighties and early nineties. However, as time progressed the percent increase in yield became less with the result that wheat stocks remained very close to the annual world demand. In recent years, the world wheat stocks have fallen to dangerously low level. In 1995, the world consumption of wheat was predicted to exceed production by 16.4 million tonnes (USDA Foreign Agriculture Service, 1995). |
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