ABSTRACT
Salinity is well known among the environmental or abiotic stresses that affect the normal physiological functioning of an organism. The physiological and biochemical disturbances imposed by salinity in plant systems result in a huge loss in agricultural production worldwide (Munns and Tester, 2008). In terms of the magnitude of the salinity problem in agriculture, it has been estimated that more than 80 million ha of agricultural lands, representing 40% of total irrigated land worldwide, are affected because of salinization (Xiong and Zhu, 2001), and more than 50% of all arable lands are likely to suffer from soil salinization due to irrigation and climate change by 2050 (Wang et al., 2003). Among the crops, the cultivation of rice, which is grown as a paddy crop worldwide, is the most severely affected by salinity. The reason for the severe damaging effect of salinity on rice cultivation could be because of its semi-aquatic nature, requiring a large amount of water for vegetative growth compared with other crops. The adverse effect of salinity on rice cultivation is against the backdrop of the requirement for its increase in production to 800 million tons from the current figure of ~500 million tons (Virk et al., 2004) to meet the demand of an estimated 9.6 billion people by 2050 (FAO, 2009). In fact, the demand for an increase in production of all crops is increasing day by day, and it will be necessary to increase agricultural production by 87% by the year 2050 (Kromdijk and Long, 2016); therefore, solutions are required to the agricultural loss caused by salinity.
