Agriculture provides raw material to industry which generates employment and strengthens economic self-reliance. Unfortunately, contemporary agriculture is confronted with multifarious problems which have shattered the concept of sustainable agriculture.

Though the world farming communities are harvesting the fruits of green revolution, there are many snags in boosting production. These include uncertain and low productivity and failure of conventional farming in resolving the long-standing agriculture and environmental issues.

In the present scenarios, biotechnology has emerged a novel area of scientific endeavour which possess a huge potential to realise the dream of sustainable agriculture and environment.

Being enriched by inputs from both conventional and modern scientific experimentation like genomic research, biotechnology could prove a panacea for uplifting of degraded socio-economic and scientific infrastructure on sound basis in all developing countries like Pakistan.

As embedded with cultural and socio-economic values, biotechnology might be helpful in resolving long lasting agricultural and environmental issues like over-exploitation of human resources etc.

Across the globe, an intensive work is going on to exploit the biotech knowledge ornamented with the genome reshuffling to address major agricultural and environmental issues like salinity, drought and biodiversity degradation which the so-called green revolution almost failed to resolve.

Through gene reshuffling, the drought and salt resistant varieties are being introduced for obtaining optimum benefits from less than ideal soil conditions.

Green revolution performed well on normal soil conditions but unfortunately it could not help farmers having degraded landscapes in most countries of the world. There is no significant change in the rehabilitation of soils affected by higher salts concentrations.

Like other countries, in Pakistan, a major portion of irrigated and rain-fed area is salt affected. Since green revolution, different strategies based on physio-chemical methodologies have been proposed by scientific communities.

Admittedly, some success stories exist within the domain of these approaches but in most cases these proved timely. None of these helped farming sector on sustainable and long-term basis. Particularly, under our natural conditions, we could not reap bonanza due to our arid conditions.

Drought conditions coupled with salt affected conditions proved a major limiting factor in the success of these conventional approaches to attain sustainable agriculture and environment.

Around the globe, all conventional approaches to long-lasting agricultural and environmental issues have been replaced with recent biotech approaches. But unfortunately, the pre-existing trend in our research endeavour has not shown a remarkable shift accordingly.

Likewise pest problem remained unresolved and became more severe. About 30-50 per cent of food produced becomes victim to pest each year. In addition, extensive use of pesticides on crops has given birth to contaminated commodities.

Many people within the country and abroad have raised their comments on the quality of cotton, vegetables, fruits, rice and other crops. Contamination of vegetables and fruits with pesticides residues in the daily-use vegetables have been extensively reported by the scientists.

Indiscriminate use of pesticides has also played havoc with environmental quality, biodiversity and public health in many parts of the country. On global scale, usage of pesticides on crops has greatly declined due to several alternatives based on biological approaches.

In addition to introduction of pest, drought and salt resistant genetically modified crops, use of plant growth promoting rhizobacteria and their metabolites as bio-fertilizers, bio-pesticides and plant growth regulating substances, have received much attention.

Meanwhile, though it is hard to describe recent advances in agronomy in all its domain, a change in conventional approaches in all sectors of agricultural research by respective research institutes is highly needed in the era of biotech revolution after green revolution. For future endeavour. following strategies are suggested.

•Legitimate efforts are needed to review biotech approaches in respective fields and future research work should be based on novel ideas.

•Hi-tech instrumentation is pre-requisite before taking any initiative as most of our research laboratories are devoid of hi-tech instruments and have not conducted research of international standards.

•Characterization of plant or microbe origin enzymes/secondary metabolites and their production on commercial scale for agricultural application should be carried out to minimise the use of agrochemicals in agriculture.

•Efforts should be made for bio-remediation of contaminated and rehabilitation of the degraded landscapes for production of high quality commodities.

•There is a dire need to upgrade the infrastructure of research institutes by undertaking reforms proposed by the scientific communities to encourage them to demonstrate well on scientific grounds.

•Exploitation of biological alternatives employed for sustainable crop production and environmental remediation should be promoted at academic and research institutes for the development of successful biological approaches to resolve the different agricultural and environmental issues.