Phosphorus sustains life

Abstract

With a world population reaching 7 billion in 2011 and projected to increase up to 50% in the next 4 decades, coupled with expected increases in the living standards, agriculture is faced with a huge challenge to double the food production in that period, but on a shrinking area of farmland. This challenge needs to be met without harming the environment. With all that in mind, it is quite clear that management of phosphorus cycling in the soil-plant continuum becomes a critical issue, even if one accepts relatively optimistic estimates of the existing phosphate rock resources and rosy projections about yet undiscovered potential phosphate rock deposits made by the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC), estimating there are sufficient phosphate rock reserves for fertiliser production for the next 300–400 years (as opposed to recent warnings that the world will run out of phosphate rock in about 1/10 of that time). To address the importance of P in food production, the 4th International Symposium on Phosphorus Cycling in the Soil-Plant Continuum titled “Phosphorus Sustains Life” was held in Beijing, China, 19–23 September 2010. It continued the series that started in Beijing (2000) followed by Perth, Australia (2003) and Uberlandia, Brazil (2006). The 4th Symposium continued to emphasise multidisciplinarity, providing a forum for exchange of ideas by soil and industrial chemists, agronomists, ecologists, plant physiologists, microbiologists, breeders, molecular biologists, environmental scientists, and others. The symposium attracted 187 registered participants from 24 countries, and featured 181 abstracts and 140 posters. The symposium was organised around five themes covering phosphorus research from the molecular to the ecosystem levels: