Pomegranate under drought and salinity

There is an old saying that ¿Grow rice to eat for days, fruits for months and educate people to live for years." I guess this statement has imprortance everywhere as the world is threatened by consequences of global climate change and accelerating population growth (~7 billion July 12, 2011). One of the two approaches to fetch the demand of growing billion is either by bumper yield or the sustainable production. As the bumper production requires lots of inputs, expensive and ecologically unjustifiable, growers have to rely on the sustainable production. This is why an emphasis has been paid recently towards the use of locally available resources by local people for sustainable farm production. The later approach of farming may help to the people who are earning less than 2$ a day and suffering from the vicious cyle of poverty. In this book, an extensive field research was carried out in the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Sede Boqer Campus, Israel under combined drought and salinity stress with pomegranate as a model crop. The idea is equally important with other crop type and the growing environment.