Feeding Hungry World

Today, the world is facing big problems as the economy rising year to year. We all
know those problems, from environmentally-related problems to economic-political situation.
But one problem may determine our existence from now on to tomorrow. That big problem is
how we can feed millions of people around the world with highly efficient resource usage
and also with the mitigation of climate change itself.

The world has millions of scientist from many fields, we also knew about the warning
several decades before. Now a day, we have so many movements from around the world,
declaring “Go Green” activities and poverty alleviation. All that we know so far are those
movements do not attach key point about movement itself. What we call about the key point
of movement is “word”. Everything firstly began with word(s). Anything that we can feel,
hear, know, understand, anything that we knew only and only can be expressed by word(s).
When we intend to have a great movement such the movement from industrial based life to
environmentally friendly life with equal distribution of welfare and enough food for all, all
we need is attaching the major root which may affect all those movements from any single
little parts of it to the major parts of the movement. That is word. And eventually, when we
concern about word, then we also concern about culture. Human civilizations are created by
their own culture, their own knowledge. And those are expressed by their own language, then
their own words.

History has been proved the power of words to national movements. I here can say that
Indonesia’s independency was the results of words awareness of the youth. The
independency which Indonesian gathered is a manifest of spirit to learn more and more then
it accumulates into national awareness. The youth learnt from vernacular newspaper which
was brought to the Hindia by the Dutch colonialization. They (the youth) didn’t only learn
about ideas which were popular in Europe at that time, but also they served as editor, and any
other parts of newspaper-making, just like an internship before the youth gained momentum
to aware. The momentum to aware about nation also gained by open education to local youth
gave by the Dutch government. The youth were now really can access Europe’s books,
anything popular in Europe. Lifestyle which was brought by the Dutch also affected the local
youth. Those lifestyle are hang out in café, discussing about ideas to people there which were
conglomerate, politician, student, etc. So with those accesses, education, and lifestyle, the
local youth fell about their own identity. That what we call later as nation-awareness.

Words to education, then education to lifestyle (culture) are the key of Indonesian self-
awareness about their own nationality, independency. Those examples are great study case
that we can learn and mimic to gain youth awareness about how to feed the hungry world in
the future.

The next problem is how we can ignite those kinds of momentums? Firstly, we need to
mimic the concept about national youth movement. All we need to prepare are accessibility
and persuasion or maybe we called spirit summoning. We need to prepare accessibility to any
cultural resources. You may ask why in this millennium we still have to give accessibility to
public, because in this millennium almost people have access to internet? I mean here is not
that kind of accessibility, but accessibility to resources. What kind of resources? It is
resources that potentially igniting the youth about food concern. We can ignite their spirit to
concern about food problem by attaching their mind about what popular now. Example, this
is an era for Instagram, a social media which every users of it can share their own photos
simply from their smartphone with quickly cool photo’s effects. Why we don’t use that
technology to attract youth. We can share cool farm photos just like one of Intagrammers
used to do like @farmert (Tucker Taylor) who is sharing his own farm activities with cool
object photos.

In Indonesia, effects of social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are really
great. Once the public share something about what popular such as K-POP etc then the public
in some areas (usually in metropolitan like Jakarta, Bandung, and Surabaya) can accumulate
into K-POP communities or anything about Korea’s bands! The interval of times they need to
create the community really fast, thanks for the help of social media. One great thing about
Indonesian youth is their willing to not eat rather than they have to lose access to social
media. Really weird but it’s a great momentum too. Community’s concern about this firstly
created by Ridwan Kamil, an architect alumnus of Bandung Institute of Technology. He
created the community called Indonesia Berkebun (Indonesian Farming) in Jakarta as a
solution of his fidgety where so many useless land in metropolitan whom public do not open
its potential for farming. He successfully created the community and now the community has
spread in the entire country from west to east far. And again thanks to the social media,
especially Twitter and Google+.
 The movement community like Indonesia Berkebun created by Ridwan Kamil is not
sufficient against poverty and food problems. But, it may promote a new lifestyle of “Back to
garden” as they only do the activities for hobbies orientation. The action created by Ridwan
Kamil interesting for the youth, they now creating farm in cities that we know as urban
farming. He created lifestyle of new farming model, in the city, by youth, and the activities
intended to replace existing lifestyle where many Indonesian youth always spend their
weekend in malls. It is brilliant!

Ridwan Kamil ideas and his actions have positive impact for Indonesia. But we can still
focusing the movement to the real problems, feeding the world.