As part of the Millenium Development Goals, the 189 UN member countries committed to halve hunger between 1990 and 2015. This imposes a substantial increase (about 40%) in grain production worldwide. In order to increase crop yields and to expand the cultivated areas, enhancing resistance to environmental stress - including pathogens, drought and salinity - is essential. Pests can be very efficiently controlled by GM Bt technology and substantial yield increases have been recorded after ten years of its use in crop plants.(1) Tolerance to abiotic stress like water shortage and salinity is much more complex as it relies on a network of cooperating genes, hence it is difficult to modify by single gene transfer, but promising results have been obtained in model plants and are being transferred to important food species in field conditions.(2,3) Maize, wheat and rice could be the first important crops benefiting from these emerging technologies. Besides providing plants with better resistance to adverse environments, genetic engineering is also proving successful for enhancing the very basic processes of biomass production and plant architecture, once considered as unreachable targets for GM technology. There is indeed growing evidence that single gene modification may significantly and positively impact on plant metabolism and architecture, leading to enhanced carbon fixation and partitioning into harvestable plant products.(4)