• Home
  • About RSIS
    • Introduction
    • Building the Foundations
    • Welcome Message
    • Board of Governors
    • Staff Profiles
      • Executive Deputy Chairman’s Office
      • Dean’s Office
      • Management
      • Distinguished Fellows
      • Faculty and Research
      • Associate Research Fellows, Senior Analysts and Research Analysts
      • Visiting Fellows
      • Adjunct Fellows
      • Administrative Staff
    • Honours and Awards for RSIS Staff and Students
    • RSIS Endowment Fund
    • Endowed Professorships
    • Career Opportunities
    • Getting to RSIS
  • Research
    • Research Centres
      • Centre for Multilateralism Studies (CMS)
      • Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies (NTS Centre)
      • Centre of Excellence for National Security (CENS)
      • Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS)
      • International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR)
    • Research Programmes
      • National Security Studies Programme (NSSP)
      • Studies in Inter-Religious Relations in Plural Societies (SRP) Programme
    • Future Issues and Technology Cluster
    • [email protected] Newsletter
    • Other Research
      • Science and Technology Studies Programme (STSP) (2017-2020)
  • Graduate Education
    • Graduate Programmes Office
    • Overview
    • MSc (Asian Studies)
    • MSc (International Political Economy)
    • MSc (International Relations)
    • MSc (Strategic Studies)
    • NTU-Warwick Double Masters Programme
    • PhD Programme
    • Exchange Partners and Programmes
    • How to Apply
    • Financial Assistance
    • Meet the Admissions Team: Information Sessions and other events
    • RSIS Alumni
  • Alumni & Networks
    • Alumni
    • Asia-Pacific Programme for Senior Military Officers (APPSMO)
    • Asia-Pacific Programme for Senior National Security Officers (APPSNO)
    • International Strategy Forum-Asia (ISF-Asia)
    • SRP Executive Programme
    • Terrorism Analyst Training Course (TATC)
  • Publications
    • RSIS Publications
      • Annual Reviews
      • Books
      • Bulletins and Newsletters
      • Commentaries
      • Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses
      • Commemorative / Event Reports
      • IDSS Paper
      • Interreligious Relations
      • Monographs
      • NTS Insight
      • Policy Reports
      • Working Papers
      • RSIS Publications for the Year
    • Glossary of Abbreviations
    • External Publications
      • Authored Books
      • Journal Articles
      • Edited Books
      • Chapters in Edited Books
      • Policy Reports
      • Working Papers
      • Op-Eds
      • External Publications for the Year
    • Policy-relevant Articles Given RSIS Award
  • Media
    • Great Powers
    • Sustainable Security
    • Other Resource Pages
    • Media Highlights
    • News Releases
    • Speeches
    • Vidcast Channel
    • Audio/Video Forums
  • Events
  • Giving
  • Contact Us
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
RSISVideoCast RSISVideoCast rsis.sg
Linkedin
instagram instagram rsis.sg
RSS
  • Home
  • About RSIS
      • Introduction
      • Building the Foundations
      • Welcome Message
      • Board of Governors
      • Staff Profiles
        • Executive Deputy Chairman’s Office
        • Dean’s Office
        • Management
        • Distinguished Fellows
        • Faculty and Research
        • Associate Research Fellows, Senior Analysts and Research Analysts
        • Visiting Fellows
        • Adjunct Fellows
        • Administrative Staff
      • Honours and Awards for RSIS Staff and Students
      • RSIS Endowment Fund
      • Endowed Professorships
      • Career Opportunities
      • Getting to RSIS
  • Research
      • Research Centres
        • Centre for Multilateralism Studies (CMS)
        • Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies (NTS Centre)
        • Centre of Excellence for National Security (CENS)
        • Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS)
        • International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR)
      • Research Programmes
        • National Security Studies Programme (NSSP)
        • Studies in Inter-Religious Relations in Plural Societies (SRP) Programme
      • Future Issues and Technology Cluster
      • [email protected] Newsletter
      • Other Research
        • Science and Technology Studies Programme (STSP) (2017-2020)
  • Graduate Education
      • Graduate Programmes Office
      • Overview
      • MSc (Asian Studies)
      • MSc (International Political Economy)
      • MSc (International Relations)
      • MSc (Strategic Studies)
      • NTU-Warwick Double Masters Programme
      • PhD Programme
      • Exchange Partners and Programmes
      • How to Apply
      • Financial Assistance
      • Meet the Admissions Team: Information Sessions and other events
      • RSIS Alumni
  • Alumni & Networks
      • Alumni
      • Asia-Pacific Programme for Senior Military Officers (APPSMO)
      • Asia-Pacific Programme for Senior National Security Officers (APPSNO)
      • International Strategy Forum-Asia (ISF-Asia)
      • SRP Executive Programme
      • Terrorism Analyst Training Course (TATC)
  • Publications
      • RSIS Publications
        • Annual Reviews
        • Books
        • Bulletins and Newsletters
        • Commentaries
        • Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses
        • Commemorative / Event Reports
        • IDSS Paper
        • Interreligious Relations
        • Monographs
        • NTS Insight
        • Policy Reports
        • Working Papers
        • RSIS Publications for the Year
      • Glossary of Abbreviations
      • External Publications
        • Authored Books
        • Journal Articles
        • Edited Books
        • Chapters in Edited Books
        • Policy Reports
        • Working Papers
        • Op-Eds
        • External Publications for the Year
      • Policy-relevant Articles Given RSIS Award
  • Media
      • Great Powers
      • Sustainable Security
      • Other Resource Pages
      • Media Highlights
      • News Releases
      • Speeches
      • Vidcast Channel
      • Audio/Video Forums
  • Events
  • Giving
  • Contact Us
  • instagram instagram rsis.sg
Connect

Getting to RSIS

Map

Address

Nanyang Technological University
Block S4, Level B3,
50 Nanyang Avenue,
Singapore 639798

View location on Google maps Click here for directions to RSIS

Get in Touch

    Connect with Us

      rsis.ntu
      rsis_ntu
      rsisntu
    RSISVideoCast RSISVideoCast rsisvideocast
      school/rsis-ntu
    instagram instagram rsis.sg
      RSS
    Subscribe to RSIS Publications
    Subscribe to RSIS Events

    RSIS Intranet

    S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies Think Tank and Graduate School Ponder The Improbable Since 1966
    Nanyang Technological University Nanyang Technological University

    Skip to content

     
    • RSIS
    • Publication
    • RSIS Publications
    • CO11086 | Asia’s Food Security Conundrum
    • Annual Reviews
    • Books
    • Bulletins and Newsletters
    • Commentaries
    • Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses
    • Commemorative / Event Reports
    • IDSS Paper
    • Interreligious Relations
    • Monographs
    • NTS Insight
    • Policy Reports
    • Working Papers
    • RSIS Publications for the Year

    CO11086 | Asia’s Food Security Conundrum
    Paul Teng, , Margarita Escaler

    01 June 2011

    download pdf
    RSIS Commentary is a platform to provide timely and, where appropriate, policy-relevant commentary and analysis of topical and contemporary issues. The authors’ views are their own and do not represent the official position of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), NTU. These commentaries may be reproduced with prior permission from RSIS and due credit to the author(s) and RSIS. Please email to Editor RSIS Commentary at [email protected].

    Synopsis

    Feeding Asia’s growing population requires modern agriculture based on the latest science and technology. Asian countries should embrace modern farming techniques and invest in R&D to develop sustainable food production systems.

    Commentary

    RECENT COMMENTS by the Prince of Wales at Georgetown University on food security have reignited a contentious debate: does sustainable food production require modern technology and inputs that affect the environment? It is important and timely to frame this debate against the backdrop of two recent announcements. The first was the Asian Development Bank’s claim that more people will be driven into poverty because of spiralling food prices. The second was the United Nations’ assertion that the world’s population may exceed the nine billion projected by 2050 or even exceed 10 billion.

    Over half the world’s human population is now living in cities; in Asia at least 70% will live in cities by 2050. This demographic change underlies the importance of the nexus between growing food and sustaining the environment to support farming. Even with the best efforts from science, technology and land use planning, cities will not be able to produce many of the food items now commonly expected in modern societies.

    Framing the issues

    How will the additional billion mouths be fed given that most of these people will live in cities? How will food be grown when there will be fewer people farming and less land and water available for food production? It has been estimated that in the next 50 years, humankind will consume as much food as in the past 10,000 years. What will sustainable food production look like in Asia where the number of hungry mouths far exceed the entire population of the United Kingdom?

    While the 1960’s “Green Revolution” had in some areas led to environmental degradation, it also helped stave off mass starvation in Asia. The late Norman Borlaug, Nobel Peace Laureate in 1971, warned that if modern technologies are not used to maintain the crop yield increases, more forests would have to be cut down to produce enough food for the growing human population. There are about four billion more mouths to feed in the next 40 years, mainly from Asia. And that does not include the current one billion hungry people estimated by the World Bank!

    Instead of knocking technology, the germane question to ask is what sustainability means in an Asian context? All farming involves environmental disturbance, but what kind of technology supports sustainable food production at an acceptable level of environmental impact?

    Technology-based modern agriculture

    Agriculture has been and will continue to require technological innovations. The early strains of today’s modern staples were low-yielding and possessed many natural traits that made them difficult to harvest. Through a process of selection over the centuries, humans were able to gradually improve the strains of such crops. But it was not until the 20th Century when modern plant breeding techniques were introduced and strains with more manageable traits were developed.

    These improvements meant that farming had become specialised and could be counted on, barring unexpected disasters, to feed growing populations. Some have classified the evolution of farming systems along a typology of feeding capacity. The “slash and burn” systems, still practised in parts of Kalimantan and among hill tribes in the Mekong sub-continent, can only feed single families. The intensive modern rice fields of Vietnam and Thailand, in which modern rice technology is employed, have enabled one farm family to produce enough rice to feed another 20-30 families.

    This modern rice technology includes improved rice strains, fertiliser, pest and water management techniques. The International Rice Research Institute has calculated that it takes a rice farmer over 100 hours of ploughing a hectare of land with a caribou to get it ready for planting. Mechanisation has reduced this time, reduced the drudgery and has made life easier for small farmers.

    The Paradox

    Does the conundrum become a paradox? Rice fields are complex man-made agro- ecosystems. They can be managed in such a way that ecosystem services are protected without reducing the need for higher yields to feed growing populations. Environmental degradation is not the norm in modern farming despite what doomsayers claim. What modern societies need to do now is to continue improving the knowledge for sustainably managing human-created and human-managed ecosystems in agriculture. We do not have the luxury of going back to the pre-modernity norms of farming if we are to maintain the current living standards of the majority of people, and keep the price of basic food commodity items affordable.

    Any significant move away from modern farming means that the food security of those living in cities will be threatened. This is especially so in the supply of foodstuffs which require countrysides to grow, such as rice and wheat. Countries like China and India have invested heavily in agricultural research; the irony is that biotechnology actually has the potential to produce the ideal organic crop strain if its detractors allow it to do so.

    Addressing the conundrum in Asia

    With more than 60% of the world’s population and some of the fastest growing economies, Asia’s food security issues are magnified in contrast to the Americas or Europe. Norman Borlaug was a strong advocate of using modern science and technology to increase food production. He had estimated that without an increase in farm productivity, an additional 1.6 billion hectares of arable land will be needed by 2050 to grow enough food.

    This is clearly untenable. Deforestation and other land conversions in several Asian countries are already having significant negative consequences. The choice for Asian governments is to increase the investment in R&D. This will generate the knowledge and technology for producing more food from the same, if not, reduced land areas.

    About the Authors

    Paul Teng and J. Jackson Ewing are respectively, Professor & Senior Fellow, and Post-Doctoral Fellow, at the Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. Marga Escaler is a Research Fellow of the National Institute of Education, Singapore. 

    Categories: Commentaries / Non-Traditional Security / East Asia and Asia Pacific / South Asia / Southeast Asia and ASEAN

    Last updated on 14/10/2014

    RSIS Commentary is a platform to provide timely and, where appropriate, policy-relevant commentary and analysis of topical and contemporary issues. The authors’ views are their own and do not represent the official position of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), NTU. These commentaries may be reproduced with prior permission from RSIS and due credit to the author(s) and RSIS. Please email to Editor RSIS Commentary at [email protected].

    Synopsis

    Feeding Asia’s growing population requires modern agriculture based on the latest science and technology. Asian countries should embrace modern farming techniques and invest in R&D to develop sustainable food production systems.

    Commentary

    RECENT COMMENTS by the Prince of Wales at Georgetown University on food security have reignited a contentious debate: does sustainable food production require modern technology and inputs that affect the environment? It is important and timely to frame this debate against the backdrop of two recent announcements. The first was the Asian Development Bank’s claim that more people will be driven into poverty because of spiralling food prices. The second was the United Nations’ assertion that the world’s population may exceed the nine billion projected by 2050 or even exceed 10 billion.

    Over half the world’s human population is now living in cities; in Asia at least 70% will live in cities by 2050. This demographic change underlies the importance of the nexus between growing food and sustaining the environment to support farming. Even with the best efforts from science, technology and land use planning, cities will not be able to produce many of the food items now commonly expected in modern societies.

    Framing the issues

    How will the additional billion mouths be fed given that most of these people will live in cities? How will food be grown when there will be fewer people farming and less land and water available for food production? It has been estimated that in the next 50 years, humankind will consume as much food as in the past 10,000 years. What will sustainable food production look like in Asia where the number of hungry mouths far exceed the entire population of the United Kingdom?

    While the 1960’s “Green Revolution” had in some areas led to environmental degradation, it also helped stave off mass starvation in Asia. The late Norman Borlaug, Nobel Peace Laureate in 1971, warned that if modern technologies are not used to maintain the crop yield increases, more forests would have to be cut down to produce enough food for the growing human population. There are about four billion more mouths to feed in the next 40 years, mainly from Asia. And that does not include the current one billion hungry people estimated by the World Bank!

    Instead of knocking technology, the germane question to ask is what sustainability means in an Asian context? All farming involves environmental disturbance, but what kind of technology supports sustainable food production at an acceptable level of environmental impact?

    Technology-based modern agriculture

    Agriculture has been and will continue to require technological innovations. The early strains of today’s modern staples were low-yielding and possessed many natural traits that made them difficult to harvest. Through a process of selection over the centuries, humans were able to gradually improve the strains of such crops. But it was not until the 20th Century when modern plant breeding techniques were introduced and strains with more manageable traits were developed.

    These improvements meant that farming had become specialised and could be counted on, barring unexpected disasters, to feed growing populations. Some have classified the evolution of farming systems along a typology of feeding capacity. The “slash and burn” systems, still practised in parts of Kalimantan and among hill tribes in the Mekong sub-continent, can only feed single families. The intensive modern rice fields of Vietnam and Thailand, in which modern rice technology is employed, have enabled one farm family to produce enough rice to feed another 20-30 families.

    This modern rice technology includes improved rice strains, fertiliser, pest and water management techniques. The International Rice Research Institute has calculated that it takes a rice farmer over 100 hours of ploughing a hectare of land with a caribou to get it ready for planting. Mechanisation has reduced this time, reduced the drudgery and has made life easier for small farmers.

    The Paradox

    Does the conundrum become a paradox? Rice fields are complex man-made agro- ecosystems. They can be managed in such a way that ecosystem services are protected without reducing the need for higher yields to feed growing populations. Environmental degradation is not the norm in modern farming despite what doomsayers claim. What modern societies need to do now is to continue improving the knowledge for sustainably managing human-created and human-managed ecosystems in agriculture. We do not have the luxury of going back to the pre-modernity norms of farming if we are to maintain the current living standards of the majority of people, and keep the price of basic food commodity items affordable.

    Any significant move away from modern farming means that the food security of those living in cities will be threatened. This is especially so in the supply of foodstuffs which require countrysides to grow, such as rice and wheat. Countries like China and India have invested heavily in agricultural research; the irony is that biotechnology actually has the potential to produce the ideal organic crop strain if its detractors allow it to do so.

    Addressing the conundrum in Asia

    With more than 60% of the world’s population and some of the fastest growing economies, Asia’s food security issues are magnified in contrast to the Americas or Europe. Norman Borlaug was a strong advocate of using modern science and technology to increase food production. He had estimated that without an increase in farm productivity, an additional 1.6 billion hectares of arable land will be needed by 2050 to grow enough food.

    This is clearly untenable. Deforestation and other land conversions in several Asian countries are already having significant negative consequences. The choice for Asian governments is to increase the investment in R&D. This will generate the knowledge and technology for producing more food from the same, if not, reduced land areas.

    About the Authors

    Paul Teng and J. Jackson Ewing are respectively, Professor & Senior Fellow, and Post-Doctoral Fellow, at the Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. Marga Escaler is a Research Fellow of the National Institute of Education, Singapore. 

    Categories: Commentaries / Non-Traditional Security

    Last updated on 14/10/2014

    Back to top

    Terms of Use | Privacy Statement
    Copyright © S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. All rights reserved.
    This site uses cookies to offer you a better browsing experience. By continuing, you are agreeing to the use of cookies on your device as described in our privacy policy. Learn more
    OK
    Latest Book
    CO11086 | Asia’s Food Security Conundrum

    Synopsis

    more info