Covariant meson-baryon scattering with chiral and large N_c constraints

We give a review of recent progress on the application of the relativistic chiral SU(3) Lagrangian to meson-baryon scattering. It is shown that a combined chiral and 1/N_c expansion of the Bethe-Salpeter interaction kernel leads to a good description of the kaon-nucleon, antikaon-nucleon and pion-nucleon scattering data typically up to laboratory momenta of p_lab about 500 MeV. We solve the covariant coupled channel Bethe-Salpeter equation with the interaction kernel truncated to chiral order Q^3 where we include only those terms which are leading in the large N_c limit of QCD.