With national TV and radio headlines this week focusing on world food security – at the same time as reports were circulating that the Irish Government was considering introducing the sort of compulsory planting orders last seen during WW2 – agriculture and food production were pushed centre stage by the conflict in Ukraine.

It's been heartening to see that over recent days and weeks, farming and farmers have played their role in the huge response to the crisis in Ukraine. Pledges of support and donations – both monetary and of physical goods – have been made from all parts of the country and have highlighted the huge desire from the farming community to express its solidarity with the Ukrainian people and its key agricultural industries.

But on the wider political and economic front, it’s quickly become clear that the well-documented effects which the military action will have on the supplies of grain – from what has always been recognised as one of the breadbaskets of Europe – will have worldwide repercussions for several years to come.

The turmoil in the wheat futures market, which started on day one of the conflict, seems to have continued as the extent of the ramifications became clear – with the war hitting not only production directly, but also impacting the ability of an area of the globe which supplies more than a third of total world wheat exports to ship grain.

As we all know – quite literally to our cost – on top of that, the restrictions placed on a large proportion of global fertiliser supplies will also have the exacerbating effect of biting deeply into the ability of other parts of the world to compensate for the loss of production.

The two-fold hit – with the possibility of limited physical availability of fertilisers, together with the economic impact of a huge increase in their costs – means that the already declining use of fertilisers, which has been at least partly responsible for world grain stocks standing at historically low levels, is likely to see further erosion.

At the beginning of the week, Svein Tore Holsether, head of Yara, Europe’s largest fertiliser manufacturer, told the BBC that the war in Ukraine would deliver a shock to the global supply and cost of food: "We were already in a difficult situation before the war and now it's additional disruption to the supply chains and we're getting close to the most important part of this season for the Northern hemisphere, where a lot of fertiliser needs to move on and that will quite likely be impacted."

He explained that while the lack of normal flow of nitrogen fertilisers from these two areas would be a major factor in the marketplace, the same parts also held a considerable proportion of the world’s reserves of the raw materials, such as potash and phosphate, used in manufacturing compound fertilisers.

Pointing out that around 50% of the food eaten around the world originated from the nitrogen fertilisers produced through the Haber-Bosch process, he said if it wasn’t used to grow crops, yields and world-wide production would fall by a similar amount. "For me, it's not whether we are moving into a global food crisis – it's how large the crisis will be," Holsether pointedly said.

Meanwhile, the Irish Farmers Association (IFA) was warning that it would be very unwise for the Irish Government to press ahead with plans to introduce compulsory crop growing measures before discussing the issue with farmers.

Press reports had indicated that the country’s Minister for Agriculture, Charlie McConalogue, was set to call on farmers to grow more grain in order to counter any potential supply shortages later this year resulting from the conflict in Ukraine.

While a meeting with producers were to be organised for later in the week, IFA president, Tim Cullinan, said that no discussions had so far taken place about moves to make crop growing compulsory: “We are in very challenging times and farmers will certainly play our part in any national or European effort,” he said.

“However, it is far from certain that asking all farmers to plant crops is the best use of the resources that are likely to be available to us,” he said, adding that the biggest issue facing farmers was rocketing costs and availability of inputs.

“This is where the government needs to focus their efforts, as well as looking at some of their own regulations,” Cullinan said, repeating a call made earlier by the association for direct government support to help offset the additional costs of fertilisers. “Irish farming is very different than it was in the 1940s. What was done then, may not be the solution today."

Whether or not the wartime practice will be resuscitated remains to be seen – but such plans haven’t been the only ideas floated to increase grain production in other areas of the world.

In the US a call has already been made for the so-called ‘conservation reserve’ land – effectively long-term structural set aside for environmental reasons – to be brought back into grain production. In the EU, similar ideas have been floated to increase production on fallow land – with specific calls for a simplification of the rules to allow more protein crops to be grown on them.

Earlier this week, NFU Scotland joined in with a plea for the lifting of support scheme rules which restricted cropping in order to allow farmers in this country to grow as much as they could to contribute to the country’s – and the world’s – food security.

But while the impact on grain production, fertiliser and fuel costs might have a considerable impact on food prices in Western countries, for developing nations the sudden reduction in direct supplies from Ukraine and Russia, along with the likely diversion of any available exportable surpluses from elsewhere in the global marketplace to countries better able to afford them, is likely to put considerable strains on food provision.

Read more: Brian Henderson: Waiting to see which way the wind is blowing 

As the last time prices jumped so sharply highlighted, the claim that most countries are only two empty shelf days away from major riots and revolution holds true. In 2007 and 2008, food shortages saw riots in countries which lost out on the high prices – from Haiti to the Ivory Coast – erupt with riots.

A similar situation in 2009/10 was behind the food shortages which led to the so-called Arab Spring, which saw major political upheavals in many Middle Eastern nations.

All of which draws the environmental and climate change focus of policy development somewhat into question – especially if, as it looks set to do south of the Border, it significantly impacts the country’s ability to produce food.

While this past week had seen the Low Carbon Agriculture Show taking place at Stoneleigh, I couldn’t help but feel that it had been somewhat overtaken by events on the world stage – and just like the SRUC survey which found that four out of five Scots considered climate change the biggest emergency facing the world, I strongly suspect that opinions might have changed somewhat.

Now there’s no getting away from the fact that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, climate change mitigation, carbon sequestration and sustainable farming practices are all still going to be highly important in the future, with farming playing a key role in reaching net zero.

Personally, I’ve always assumed that one of the major threats which global warming posed to mankind will be the challenges it will present to our ability to produce enough food to sustain the population. Like many in the industry, it had always struck me that introducing measures which will reduce food production seems a perverse way to tackle the issue.

Maybe we won’t be alone in that view for much longer …