The good news is that over the past half century, we have developed the knowledge and the technical toolkit to tackle these daunting challenges to expanding food production in the face of a shifting climate and a growing population.  The late 20th century witnessed a genetic revolution with the invention of recombinant DNA technology, the explosion of genome sequencing, and the development of techniques for the reintroduction of individual genes into plants and animals.  Today, it is possible to use these techniques to modify crop plants and domestic animals very precisely through adding, removing or modifying genes to improve their productivity. One of the most familiar examples is the introduction of a bacterial toxin gene from the soil bacterium Bacillus thurengiensis into a variety of plants, conferring resistance to important lepidopteran insect pests. Today only crops altered by molecular genetic modification is known as GMOs, as if none of the domestication and plant breeding that preceded it modified genes.