Indonesian Organic Farming Issue

Recently, I was reading about 'organic farming' from Indonesian Agency for Agricultural Research and Development (IAARD), and getting interested by the topic they made up. I don't know whether their paradigm of organic farming are the same with most of academicians from universities or not (since I found that not all of my lecturer support it, due to some polemic which have been occured in Indonesia), but still, it has a value to mention it here, for why we still use 'inorganic matters' and not fully turn around to organic farming.

The organic farming in Indonesia were started since people aware of dangerously chemical compound and their usage in agriculture. Some people said, it is good to act wisely by choosing a healthy food for our live. A healthy life style with a slogan "Back to Nature" as a new trend in daily people lives. They reach this "life style" by using more (or even 'only') organic farming products. All they know (most of Indonesian whom only follow agricultural issue as a 'gossip' element) that chemical pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, and anything which related to "*something* chemical" is dangerous. The lack of agricultural education become the main problem which why sometimes people become more 'afraid' of most agricultural product.

I mentioned that organic farming become a polemic in Indonesia, since this country depend their lives by its food production. For few decades, Indonesia has an intensive utilization of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Most crop varieties were assembled to be responsives to fertilizer. So without a high amount of fertilizer, the amount of crop yields will be falling. Not only fertilizer, the application of pesticides are also high. Once, I was placed in a city of central java. There, I found out that it is hard for farmers to lower the frequencies and concentration of application. It doesn't mean that they don't know about the dangers of high concentration pesticides, but because they don't want to lose their harvest just because of pests (they need money from selling their product, right?). Some people try to predict the loses of yield if plants are not trated with pesticides and chemical fertilizers, and it could reach almost half of yield itself. We, Indonesian people, must choose, between a 'healthy' food or starvation for our people.