The Green Revolution saved a billion lives. It also made people less nourished.
That uncomfortable trade-off, yield at the expense of nutritional quality, is the starting point for a sweeping review published in Nature on June 24. Fifteen plant scientists from 14 institutions across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the United States argue that the tools to fix the problem now exist, but they must be deployed together, not piecemeal.
The review, led by Dominique Van Der Straeten of Ghent University and Alisdair R. Fernie of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, is structured around what the authors call the triple challenge: raising yields, increasing nutritional density, and building climate resilience, all at once, in the same staple crops that feed billions.
Hidden hunger
More than 700 million people live with caloric hunger, not enough food to meet basic energy needs. But a far larger number, more than two billion, suffer from micronutrient deficiencies: insufficient vitamins and minerals in their daily diet. This is “hidden hunger”, invisible in calorie counts but measurable in rates of anemia, blindness from vitamin A deficiency, neural tube defects from insufficient folate, and stunted cognitive development from lack of iodine or zinc.
The Green Revolution unintentionally worsened the problem. Breeding programs optimized for yield per hectare, not nutritional content per grain. As a result, the high-yielding varieties that now dominate global agriculture contain roughly the same micronutrient concentrations as their lower-yielding predecessors, meaning a population eating more of its calories from these staples gets fewer micronutrients per meal.
Climate change is compounding the damage. Elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide, drought, and soil salinity all reduce micronutrient densities in staple crops. A 2018 FACE (Free-Air CO₂ Enrichment) experiment found that rice grown at projected future CO₂ concentrations had significantly reduced concentrations of protein, iron, and zinc.
The tools
The review catalogs a rapidly expanding genetic toolkit. CRISPR-Cas genome editing is the headline technology, precise edits including gene knockouts, promoter editing, uORF editing, and multiplex editing. Base editing and prime editing allow single-nucleotide changes and short insertions without double-strand breaks. PrimeRoot editors (Sun et al., 2024) and transposase-assisted integration (Liu et al., 2024) enable precise insertion of large DNA sequences.
But CRISPR alone is not enough. The authors argue that it must be integrated with transgenic metabolic engineering, the multi-gene pathway stacking that produced Golden Rice (provitamin A, Ye et al., 2000), folate-rich rice reaching the recommended daily intake in a single serving (Blancquaert et al., 2015), vitamin D₃ tomatoes via CRISPR (Li et al., 2022), and multi-vitamin CRISPR-edited lettuce delivering ascorbate, β-carotene, and zeaxanthin (Livneh et al., 2025).
Other technologies in the stack include FIND-IT (accelerated trait discovery via induced mutagenesis), chromosome engineering to unlock hidden genetic variation, and CRISPR-accelerated de novo domestication of wild relatives, for example, engineering allotetraploid rice from scratch. Pan-genomics across barley, cassava, and rice is revealing structural variants that breeding programs have never been able to access.
The regulatory bottleneck
The science is accelerating. The bottleneck is approval. Many of the most promising biofortified crops, Golden Rice, high-zinc wheat, folate-biofortified rice, have been ready for years but remain stuck in regulatory pathways that treat genome-edited crops differently from conventionally bred ones. The regulatory landscape varies widely by country, and the authors note that the current system was designed for a previous generation of genetic technologies.
The timeline for achieving Zero Hunger under Sustainable Development Goal 2, 2030, is now four years away. “Given the limited time frame,” the authors write, “we argue that CRISPR-Cas technologies should be combined with metabolic engineering based on transformation and other technologies.”
Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Source: Van Der Straeten D, Bulut M, Cao D, et al. Genetic technologies to enhance crop nutritional value under climate change. Nature. 2026;654:877-891. doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10593-6