The United States' systems of renewable resource production and land stewardship face formidable challenges in the new millennium.  Among the most exacting challenges is successfully adapting these systems to the accelerating rates of change in factors affecting agricultural productivity.  Climatic extremes may now occur more frequently due to human activities.  Water and soils are being depleted more rapidly.  As global agricultural production incorporates more fertilizers, herbicides, or pesticides, water and soils are also increasingly threatened by pollution.  Unless new technologies are developed and utilized, regulations and other proposed remedies for those phenomena may rapidly complicate resource management, food and fiber production, and processing.  These complications, in turn, may result in more rapidly increasing prices paid by consumers, more volatile commercial markets, reduced profits for producers, and a narrower competitive edge for U.S. products in world markets.  More costly food may result in less nutritious diets for the poor.

Natural plant communities and landscapes that contain potentially useful plants are disappearing at an accelerated rate.  Honeybees, other insect pollinators, as well as insects potentially beneficial as natural enemies of introduced weeds or pests, are endangered in their native habitat from habitat destruction, including excessive use of pesticides. Microbes that produce industrial products, serve as biological control agents, degrade and recycle minerals, cellulose, proteins, and are indispensable for cycling nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, sulfur, and other elements, are imperiled by human disturbances of the ecosystem. Burgeoning human populations worldwide are increasingly urban, with cities now occupying ever more hectares of formerly productive agricultural land.  Industrial activity also exacerbates soil, water, and air pollution and contamination.  As a result, rates of agricultural productivity can be raised only if the remaining land under cultivation yields more agricultural production.

New, more intensive production practices implemented throughout the Nation, (e.g., higher density plantings, reduced tillage, and chemical inputs) place new demands on crops.  Formerly minor pathogens are now economically important because of changing production practices.  New, more virulent genetic variants of already important pathogens and pests are cause for grave concern.  These provide an impetus to continue searching for new sources of host-plant resistance.  Economic constraints to agricultural profitability underscore the immediate need for value-added and alternative crops for increasing the monetary return to producers (especially in rural areas), and for efficiently diversifying the productive capacity of the U.S. system of renewable resource production.

The high societal costs associated with rapid destruction of natural habitats and agricultural productive capacity may be most extreme in the developing countries of the tropics, where a wealth of genetic resources vital to U.S. agriculture is endangered.  Greater emphasis should be placed on conservation of germplasm through international cooperation.   Development and maintenance of stable biological communities in the natural environment should be a high priority goal worldwide.  Essentially all the major microbes, beneficial insects, and crops we grow and use originated in other parts of the world.  Consequently, the stability of the vast agricultural system of the United States is based primarily on organisms that were imported long ago, and on their continual genetic improvement via more recently acquired genes conserved in germplasm collections.  Extinction of these resources, or inaccessibility caused by lack of financial support for genebanks and preserves, changing regulations governing international germplasm exchange, or changing intellectual property rights regimes, may increase the genetic vulnerability of agriculture to rapidly evolving pests, pathogens, environmental changes, and to competitive market demands, the latter which changes continually and rapidly according to consumer preferences and advances in processing technology.

The demands placed on the national system of renewable resource production by a rapidly changing world can only be met by technologies that optimally harness the inherent genetic potential of insect, plant, and microbial germplasm. Production systems that optimally preserve and harness that genetic potential will maximize profits, security of supply, price stability, market competitiveness, and avoid crop losses from genetic vulnerability.  More rapid and efficient methods for identifying useful properties of genes and genomes, and for manipulating genetic and genomic material and information, are required.  These new methods will include more effective breeding strategies, and more comprehensive knowledge of microbial, insect, and crop genomic structures. More cost-effective molecular markers must be developed, so as to improve the efficiency of gene identification and mapping.  More rapid gene analyses and mapping methods and strategies are needed as are the means for determining the function of particular genomic segments.  The new scientific approaches of genomics and biotechnology are critical for developing improved crops and microbes that enable producers to maximize yields of high-quality products, but minimize chemical input, water and soil depletion, water and soil contamination, as well as production costs.

Paradoxically, sole reliance on the preceding methods of genetic improvement may lead to superior but excessively narrow genetic bases for crop, honeybee (and other beneficial insect species), or microbial gene pools. As a result, the Nation's future food, fiber, feed, ornamental, and industrial product supply may be more vulnerable to rapidly changing pathogens, pests, or environmental extremes. It may be less abundant, nutritious, and diverse, hence less capable of adapting to changing regulatory concerns or to global environmental change and changing commercial markets. Consequently, the national program in Plant, Microbial, and Insect Genetic Resources, Genomics, and Genetic Improvement (which encompasses conserving, enhancing and improving genetic resources, managing and analyzing genomic data, in addition to developing novel approaches to breeding and genetic improvement) is crucial to developing safer, more secure, and more efficient agricultural systems.

Genetic raw materials, water, air, soil, and management practices comprise the agricultural production system that sustains humanity, and provides the United States with an affordable, highly diverse, and nutritious diet. The plant, microbial, and insect genetic resources managed by this national program are the bases of the United States' systems of renewable resource production and land stewardship.  Germplasm conservation is expensive and complicated.  It requires that species or variety-specific procedures be developed (e.g., methods to culture beneficial microbial symbionts of plants, or to efficiently maintain standard check strains of plant pathogens for germplasm evaluations).  The utility and integrity of those resources must be conserved and enhanced by improved, more effective methods such as genomics.  Genomics exploit cross-organismal similarities in genetic repertoires to efficiently identify, characterize, and map genes, elucidate their function, and deploy them in genetic enhancement of crops.  With these new scientific tools and processes and traditional methods for genetic improvement, germplasm introduced from genebanks will be adapted to particular production niches, or its utility will be otherwise enhanced.