Are microbes at the root of a solution to world food production?

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Abstract
One major challenge for the twenty‐first century will be the production of sufficient food—the United Nations Population Fund estimates that the global human population may well reach 10 billion by 2050 (www.unfpa.org). This means increasing agricultural productivity of food crops, as plants form the basis of every food chain. However, agriculture in developed countries already creates a range of serious environmental problems through the use of pesticides and herbicides, salinization and the depletion of water resources. Furthermore, agricultural production in many African, Asian and South American countries cannot be increased without further destroying more areas by turning them into arable land, thus threatening global biodiversity, which is already under stress from human action. If global food production is to keep pace with an increasingly urbanized and growing population, while formulating new food production strategies for developing countries, the great challenge for modern societies is to boost plant productivity in an environmentally sustainable manner. A major effort in plant biotechnology is therefore the development of new crop varieties with enhanced disease and pest resistance, greater drought and salt tolerance and better nutritional value through the introduction of desirable traits either by conventional breeding or genetic modification. However, these efforts have traditionally focused on plant phenotypes. What has been largely ignored is the important role of microbial communities that interact with plants to influence plant health, productivity and biodiversity. The impact of the microbial world on plants is evident: worldwide each year, microbial diseases cost crop producers billions of Euros. Similarly, the important role of nitrogen fixation by rhizobia and other bacteria for plant growth has been known for decades. What is less appreciated, and less well understood, is the pervasive influence that other microbes have on plant health and growth; they enhance stress tolerance, provide disease resistance, aid nutrient availability and …

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