Again the roaring elephant in the room is population growth outstripping arable land and natural resources. Farming must increase food production in the next decades and this in turn will be harder without sufficient fresh water and fertilizers. What we really need is a global challenge on family planning. The taboo must be faced. Malthus may have got his timing wrong, but his scenario of populations growing geometrically and food production growing arithmetically is quite true. We have had some technological reprieves, but there are limits to growth.

Yes. Well said VivKay.

I'd agree that trying to "solve" food shortages without looking at population control is plain silly.
At best we could get another 50 years before the next crisis if we keep breeding exponentially.
One thing we have to sort out is inequality: The middle class don't breed like rabbits and have some capacity for food resilience and charity. So long as the top 5% of income earners take 50% of the wealth by "skimming" the economy then resources will be mis-spent. The financial system that rewards greed, produces nothing, yet takes a large whack of GDP is a massive tax on the real economy and a large impediment to real economic investment. The parasites must be shed!

I am a primary producer and licensed excise paying food first bio diesel producer as well as producer other bio-fuels.

My opinion steps two and five are the only in the seven steps have any credibility. The major cause of poverty is wealth. Wealthy people have a disproportionate cut of the productive pie. Wealthy people are generally personally not productive, they are parasites.
I agree, unless we curb population growth the whole exercise is pointless. The only thing that will curb population growth apart from mass vasectomies is education. It is important to keep the bureaucrats and the ickydumics (no it is not a spelling mistake) from attempting to solve the problem.

What are some of the things I would do?

The starters at have a global currency! Just think how many parasites that would get rid of.
Curb personal wealth. In addition to a minimum wage I would set a maximum wage that is linked to sustainable productivity. This would curb obscene wealth and ease poverty by carving up the productive pie more fairly.
Restrict government activity to the essentials. For example, health, education, security, infrastructure and the like.
Don't stuff up good productive land and water with suburbs and coal gasification projects.
Get out of the cities and go bush.

The reality is no matter what you say or I or the ickydumics say, apathy will dictate that nothing will happen until such time that the starving barbarians invade from over the horizon

Have a look at this map of world poverty... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

Basically the more red, the more poverty... But the surprise is that it is a map of FERTILITY - how many children are being born.

You know how our government seems unable to fund hospitals, schools and roads, and this is with our population failing to produce enough children to replace ourselves... imagine the problems of fundiong these essential services if the population was not declining, but trippling every twenty years... no wonder they are poor. Worse than schools and hospitals, they somehow they also need to find more farmland too!

50 years ago, perhaps we could have ended poverty. But now there are so many more poor that the problem is so much bigger. For example, there are 60 million shanty-town dwellers in India alone, and only 20 million Australians... Let alone Indonesia, the Pacific Islands, New Guinea... What about Africa? Sth America? etc etc...

Why is China becomming so rich and powerfull? The one-child policy. It means they can finally afford to catch up with the infastructire and education that nations need to get ahead and build wealth.

I don't like the 'one child policy', but Thailand and surging Iran (Think nuclear power) also have zero-population growth due to marketing, free contraception and free choice. It's not really the feminist idea that educating women reduces population growth (think Iran, they're not keen on educating women)...

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What succeds is explaining to people that too many kids leads to poverty, and long-lasting free contraceptive implants. Eventually compulsary education and urbanisation also drive down birthrates, because they make kids expensive. This tends to come along at the same time as education for all, which creates the feminist myth that only educating women decreases birthrates... it does, but that's only a small part of the picture.

On the other hand, why is the 'aging population' such a bad thing here in Australia? Surely it means we are living longer, and isn't that a good thing?

The problem is not an 'aging' population, it is that we are suiciding... failing to produce enough kids to replace ourselves.

Here we need to give tax reductions for kids so middle class parents can afford the kids we want. Those on welfare are pumping out kids like there is no tomorrow because of the welfare bribes to have lots of kids.

Meaning that single mums are pressured into having more kids than they can look after. And the payment incentives which ensure that few get married, as this reduces their welfare paynments.

Also making divorce fairer, because Australian men don't want to become dads... because they are afraid of having their kids stolen by divorce lawyers.