Looking back on the first day of Tropentag 2011 A ‘hub of discussion’, ‘the most important international conference for the development oriented scientific community’ or just a networking event… with more than 1000 participants from all over the world Tropentag is everything but boring. Looking back on the first day. ‘There are a billion people that are currently hungry. We’ve never had that number of hungry-stricken in the world before. If we’re going to feed the world by 2050 we need to increase food production by something as 70 to 100 percent. The food price spikes are going to recur and food prices will stay high.’ This statement of Sir Gordon Conway (Imperial College) during the plenary speeches on the first day of the Tropentag, will be leading during the whole conference in Bonn. These are the facts. How can research make a contribution to solve this problem? Questions As Claudia Mueller (University of Bonn) argued in the opening session of the Tropentag, research on ‘development of the margin’ is needed and should be a guiding principle for all researchers. ‘We will only be successful if we manage to improve the hunger situation for the marginalized in development.’ She raised questions such as how to balance development in favorable and marginal environments? Should marginalized people and communities become key players in an increasingly globalized resource use, and if so, how?

Rattan Lal is Professor of Soil Science in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at The Ohio State University. From 1968 to 1969 he was Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sydney and soil scientist at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ibadan, Nigeria from 1970 to 1987.