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n fertile grounds, the world’s population scales to a new landmark of 7 billion people. This growth trajectory has been successfully sustained through centuries without any stimulus. Through the ages, an apparent drought of resources has not discouraged us from flooding the planet.

In this journey of life, we are seeing fast arrivals but slow and late departures. We have to applaud Earth’s tourism for the remarkable job of attracting more than 80 million people each year.

The current milestone of adding an extra 1 billion people has occurred every 12 years.

While this period started on a positive note soon after the Asian crisis, it now finds itself being gripped by global financial crisis. Nevertheless, mankind’s determination to populate seems very resilient.

Each year, more food is needed to feed the growing population. In the 18th century, Malthus an English scholar influential in political economy observed that while unchecked population growth was exponential, the growth of food supply was arithmetical. So the question of how the world is going to feed its growing population is not a new found concern.

However, an FAO study showing the failure of the current food production and distribution systems to feed the world heightens our worries about food insecurity.

This has come as a shock because in the 1990s it appeared as though our agricultural problems had been solved reminding of a line from a Beatles song “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away”.

The end of the era of cheap food coincides with the growing concern about the prospects of feeding the world. The trend of falling real prices of staple crops has reversed and instead of settling down in the valley, it is now attempting to conquer new peaks.

Once again the food industry is in crisis, with prices having risen above their peak reached in early 2008. The re-occurrence of the current spike in three years is an indication of the handicapped state of affairs of the world to feed its current population.

This inconvenient truth rattling the world’s food chain stirs up the Malthusian fears. Malthus believed that if preventive checks were not applied, it would lead to catastrophic events that would return the world population to a lower, sustainable level.

Currently, enough food is grown to feed the world as argued by Catherine Badgley, a noted ecologist from the University of Michigan. At the same time she admits that production supplies are constrained by accessibility. We did see how global institutions failed to keep the grain moving as countries chose to shut down exports in the face of rising prices.

The faith in International food markets has collapsed since then. Today, any nation desirous of national food security should aim to achieve self-sufficiency to the best of its ability.

The degree of self-sufficiency would be an important measure of food security for the nation.

Indonesia as a major food importer is vulnerable to future price shocks. Although Indonesia is the world’s largest producer and exporter of palm oil, it nevertheless depends on imports for essential food items such as rice, wheat, corn, soybeans, sugar, etc. The combined volume of such imports was close to 18 million tons in 2010.

Although self sufficiency has already been announced as a priority, translating it to tangible results is an uphill task. More needs to be done to boost supplies through the spread of modern farming, plant research and food processing.

There are issues that need to be addressed such as evaluating the most appropriate farming technology. Agriculture can no longer rely only on intensive crop production as it has to deal with climate changes and face growing competition for land, water and energy with other industries.

A new approach based on sustainable intensification of crop output seems necessary to allow farmers to produce more from the same area of land by raising yields.

In order for domestic farmers to adopt the most modern methods of farming, they would need educational, technical as well as financial support, be it from government or any other domestic or international organization.

There also has to be a policy decision on allowing genetically modified crops. Those countries using GMOs have witnessed substantial increase in crop yields over the past few years. The fear of genetically modified crop has been holding back the use of available technology which can boost yields.

However, such fears or apprehensions have to be overcome because agronomists believe that biotechnology is critical for achieving the ecological intensification required to meet human food demand on a global scale.

Fortunately, there is still a lot of room for improvement by more conventional means in the world. Similar observations were noted even in pilot projects conducted in Indonesia. For example, the average soybean yield in Indonesia which is about 1.5 tons per hectare has been demonstrated to increase to 3 tons per hectare by precision agriculture carried out in small- and medium-size farms.

The demographic changes taking place in the world has put more stress on the planet’s resources. Given the circumstances, agriculture is expected to achieve a series of competing and overlapping goals.

These goals cannot be static and should be dynamic enough to accommodate and adapt to changes over time and place.

It appears as though, to be or not to be self sufficient is not the question, but a prerequisite to nurture growth.

The writer is director at PT FKS Multi Agro Tbk. The opinions expressed are his own.