VIENNA, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) -- An IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency) official on Tuesday called for actions to apply the nuclear technology to increase agricultural output so as to ease the food crisis.

    "This year, global food shortages combined with increasing demand have created a new food crisis," said Liang Qu, director of Joint FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) /IAEA Division of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture.

    The current global food crisis is quite serious but has not received enough attention largely due to the economic crisis, Liang told Xinhua in an interview.

    Sky-rocketing food prices not only deteriorate the living conditions of 854 million people worldwide who were already hungry, but also push at least 500 million more people into hunger, said Liang.

    On solving food security problem, especially on increasing agricultural output, the IAEA has played an important and irreplaceable role for many years, he said.

    Nature provides every species with the potential to develop many different characteristics, Liang explained.

    For example, the height of a plant, its yield, its susceptibility or resistance to disease and its ability to survive amid adverse conditions are all written into a plant's genome, but only a few are expressed, he said.

    Over a long period of time, a plant can adapt itself to different external conditions through a process of spontaneous mutation and natural selection, said the official.

    Mutation induced with nuclear radiation is helpful in screening out those favorable characteristics, thus increase farm putout, Liang said.

    On safety concerns for the technology, he said the technique of nuclear radiation induced mutation was born 80 years ago, and has already been used by a special group under the UN for 43 years, and no problem has been found so far.

    Different from the genetically-modified crops, which introduce new genetic codes from other plants or even other species into a plant's genetic makeup to create new characteristics, nuclear radiation induced mutation simply accelerates the process of spontaneous genetic changes, Liang said.

    In addition, compared with cross-breeding, which requires time and opportunity, nuclear radiation intervention could be far more effective in bringing out the desired characters of a certain crop, Liang added.

    More than 3,000 crop varieties have been bred through the direct intervention of the IAEA, which include barley that grows at 5,000-meter tableland and rice that thrives in saline soil, Liang said.

    These varieties provide much needed food as well as high economic benefits especially in developing countries, said the official.

    Noting tremendous input in some nations, including the developing ones, in the development of new bio-techs, Liang said more efforts should be put in the application of existing technologies in boosting food production.