This past autumn, the Freeman Spogli Institute ( FSI ) in conjunction with the Woods Institute for the Environment launched a program on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) to address the deficit in academia and, on a larger scale, the global dialogue surrounding the critical issues of food security, poverty, and environmental degradation.
“Hunger is the silent killer and moral outrage of our time; however, there are few
university programs in the United States designed to study and solve the problem
of global food insecurity,” states program director Rosamond L. Naylor. “FSE’s dual
affiliation with FSI and Stanford’s new Woods Institute for the Environment position
it well to make significant steps in this area.”
Through a focused research portfolio and an interdisciplinary team of scholars
led by Naylor and Center for Environmental Science and Policy (CESP) co-director
Walter P. Falcon, FSE aims to design new approaches
to solve these persistent problems, expand higher
education on food security and the environment at
Stanford, and provide direct policy outreach.
Productive food systems and their environmental
consequences form the core of the program.
Fundamentally, the FSE program seeks to understand
the food security issues that are of paramount
interest to poor countries, the food diversification
challenges that are a focus of middle-income nations,
and the food safety and subsidy concerns prominent
in richer nations.
CHRONIC HUNGER IN A TIME OF PROSPERITY
Although the world’s supply of basic foods has
doubled over the past century, roughly 850 million
people (12 percent of the world’s population) suffer
from chronic hunger. Food insecurity deaths during
the past 20 years outnumber war deaths by a factor
of at least 5 to 1. Food insecurity is particularly
widespread in agricultural regions where resource
scarcity and environmental degradation constrain
productivity and income growth.
FSE is currently assessing the impacts of climate
variability on food security in Asian rice economies.
This ongoing project combines the expertise of atmospheric scientists, agricultural
economists, and policy analysts to understand and mitigate the adverse effects of
El Niño-related climate variability on rice production and food security. As a consequence
of Falcon and Naylor’s long-standing roles as policy advisors in Indonesia,
models developed through this project have already been embedded into analytical
units within Indonesia’s Ministries of Agriculture, Planning, and Finance. “With
such forecasts in hand, the relevant government agencies are much better equipped
to mitigate the negative consequences of El Niño events on incomes and food
security in the Indonesian countryside,” explain Falcon and Naylor.
FOOD DIVERSIFICATION AND INTENSIFICATION
With rapid income growth, urbanization, and population growth in developing
economies, priorities shift from food security to the diversification of agricultural
production and consumption. “Meat production is projected to double by 2020,”
states Harold Mooney, CESP senior fellow and an author of the Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment. As a result, land once used to provide grains for humans now provides
feed for hogs and poultry.
These trends will have major consequences for the global environment—affecting
the quality of the atmosphere, water, and soil due to nutrient overloads; impacting
marine fisheries both locally and globally through fish meal use; and threatening
human health, as, for example, through excessive use of antibiotics.
An FSE project is analyzing the impact of intensive livestock production and
assessing the environmental effects to gain a better understanding of the true costs
of this resource-intensive system. A product of this work recently appeared as a
Policy Forum piece in the December 9, 2005, issue of Science titled "Losing the Links Between Livestock and Land."
Factors contributing to the global growth of livestock systems, lead author Naylor
notes, are declining feed-grain prices, relatively inexpensive transportation costs,
and trade liberalization. “But many of the true costs remain largely unaccounted
for,” she says, including destruction of forests and grasslands to provide farmland
for feed crops destined not for humans but for livestock; utilization of large quantities
of freshwater; and nitrogen losses from croplands and animal manure.
Naylor and her research team are seeking better ways to track all costs of livestock
production, especially hidden costs of ecosystem degradation and destruction.
“What is needed is a re-coupling of crop and livestock systems,” Naylor says, “if not
physically, then through pricing and other policy mechanisms that reflect social
costs of resource use and ecological abuse.”
Such policies “should not significantly compromise
the improving diets of developing countries, nor
should they prohibit trade,” Naylor adds. Instead,
they should “focus on regulatory and incentive-based
tools to encourage livestock and feed producers to
internalize pollution costs, minimize nutrient run-off,
and pay the true price of water.”
LOOKING AHEAD
The future of the program on Food Security and the
Environment looks bright and expansive. Building
on existing research at Stanford, researchers are
identifying avenues in the world’s least developed
countries to enhance orphan crop production—
crops with little international trade and investment,
but high local value for food and nutrition security.
This work seeks to identify advanced genetic and
genomic strategies, and natural resource management
initiatives, to improve orphan crop yields, enhance
crop diversity, and increase rural incomes through
orphan crop production.
Another priority research area is development of
biofuels. As countries seek energy self-reliance and
look for alternatives to food and feed subsidies
under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, the
conversion of corn, sugar, and soybeans to ethanol and other energy sources
becomes more attractive. New extraction methods are making the technology more
efficient, and high crude oil prices are fundamentally changing the economics of
biomass energy conversion. A large switch by key export food and feed suppliers,
such as the United States and Brazil, to biofuels could fundamentally alter export
prices, and hence the world food and feed situation. A team of FSE researchers will
assess the true costs of these conversions.
The FSE program recently received a grant through the Presidential Fund for
Innovation in International Studies to initiate new research activities. One project
links ongoing research at Stanford on the environmental and resource costs of
industrial livestock production and trade to assess the extent of Brazil’s rainforest
destruction for soybean production. “Tens of millions of hectares of native grassland
and rainforest are currently being cleared for soybean production to supply the global
industrial livestock sector,” says Naylor. An interdisciplinary team will examine
strategies to achieve an appropriate balance between agricultural commodity trade,
production practices, and conservation in Brazil’s rainforest states.
“I’m extremely pleased to see the rapid growth of FSE and am encouraged by
the recent support provided through the new Presidential Fund,” states Naylor. “It
enables the program to engage faculty members from economics, political science,
biology, civil and environmental engineering, earth sciences, and medicine—as
well as graduate students throughout the university—in a set of collaborative
research activities that could significantly improve human well-being and the quality
of the environment.”
