The Center on Food Security and the Environment is a joint effort of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
Rosamond Naylor, director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment, delivered the keynote address to The University of Vermont's Food Systems Summit in Burlington, VT on June 17-18, 2014. Naylor is the editor of The Evolving Sphere of Food Security (forthcoming, Oxford University Press), the first book of its kind to engage thought leaders from across Stanford’s campus to explore the causes and symptoms of complex topic like global hunger. She will discuss the book's insights on the ways that food security is tied to security of many other kinds: energy, water, health, climate, the environment, and national security.
The Evolving Sphere of Food Security is available for pre-order from Oxford University Press.
China dominates the global aquaculture industry, most clearly with its massive production and consumption of low trophic-level carp species and its rapidly rising output and exports of tilapia. Although these fish do not require a high percentage of fishmeal in their diets, their large production volumes contribute to China's leading role in global fishmeal consumption. The magnitude of China's dependence on fishmeal supplies – and hence the pressure it places on wild forage fisheries – remains a contentious issue. In this study, we use primary survey data from three provinces in China to examine the current use of aquafeeds in the carp and tilapia sectors and to assess how future demand for fishmeal will likely be affected by the country's shifting patterns of seafood consumption and production. Our results indicate that virtually all carp and tilapia farmers in our survey regions use manufactured feeds containing fishmeal and that median feed conversion ratios (FCRs) are in the range of 1.4 to 1.9. Feeds are poorly targeted on many farms due to widespread polyculture practices, especially the integration of higher-value species into carp ponds to improve farm-level profitability. Our study also suggests that government statistics underestimate household demand for fish by 20–35% because they do not account for out-of-home consumption. As China's demand for fish continues to rise in the future with per capita incomes and urbanization, the co-culture of high-valued species and the use of aquaculture feeds containing fishmeal are also expected to expand.
Ling Cao completed her Ph.D. in Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Trained as an agronomist and environmental scientist, she has focused on interdisciplinary research at the interface between the sustainability of food and natural systems. Her dissertation research quantitatively assessed the sustainability of emerging shrimp farming systems and technologies, and in particular focused on applying these results to producers and consumers in China and US. In early 2018, Cao was selected as a recipient of the “National Thousand Talents Program for Distinguished Young Scholars,” an initiative of the Chinese government to attract high-level talent from overseas to work full-time in China. In addition, she was also selected as a fellow of the “Shanghai Thousand Talents Program” which aims to recruit top-talent who are leaders in their fields to help enhance Shanghai's future development and sustainable competitiveness. Cao currently works as an associate professor in the Institute of Oceanography at Shanghai Jiao Tung University and continues to work with Roz Naylor and colleagues on fisheries and aquaculture research.
Seeds of Sustainability tackles a central challenge of sustainable development: agricultural modernization. It is cutting edge not because the issue itself is new, but rather the level of integration the authors attempted and the innovative process they used. The volume summarizes the findings and reflects on the process of a highly interdisciplinary team of researchers, integrating perspectives from: biogeochemistry, atmospheric sciences, land-use change, institutions, agronomy, economics, and knowledge systems. The foundation of the work is rigorous, grounding its findings in multiple peer reviewed publications, while not hesitating to point out gaps or unresolved issues. Seeds of Sustainability includes an in depth historical analysis, which captures issues of path dependence. It demonstrates both originality and critical reflectiveness in its efforts to engage practitioners in the conceptualization and execution of its research, and the implementation of its findings. And almost uniquely in our collective experience, it speaks seriously, frankly, and insightfully to the challenges of institutionalizing the sort of work it reports on.
Latin America (LA) has many social indicators similar to those of highly developed economies but most frequently falls midway between least developed countries and industrialized regions. To move forward, LA must address uncontrolled urbanization, agricultural production, social inequity, and destruction of natural resources. We discuss these interrelated challenges in terms of human impact on the nitrogen (N) cycle. Human activity has caused unprecedented changes to the global N cycle; in the past century; total global fixation of reactive N (Nr) has at least doubled. Excess Nr leaked into the environment negatively affects soils, atmosphere, and water resources in temperate zones. In addition to N excess from human impact, mining of natural soil N creates N deficits in some regions.
Stanford experts from a range of disciplines will discuss the interconnections and interactions among humanity’s need for and use of energy, food, water, and environmental resources. Drawing on their own research, each speaker will illustrate and evaluate some of the ways in which decisions in one resource area can lead to trade-offs or co-benefits in other areas. Stanford students and faculty will lead interactive breakout sessions to explore a range of challenges associated with energy transitioning to a sustainable system.
Featured videos:
Energy and Food Nexus: David Lobell, Assistant Professor of Environmental Earth System Science
Video link to additional Stanford faculty talks
Introduction: Energy System Overview by Roland Horne, Professor of Energy Resources Engineering
Overview of Natural Gas Issues: Mark Zoback, Professor of Geophysics
Energy and Environment Nexus: Stefan Reichelstein, Professor in the Graduate School of Business
Energy and Water Nexus: Richard Luthy, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Director of ReNUWIt
Energy and Climate Change Nexus: Michael Wara, Associate Professor of Law
Breakout Sessions
Led by postdoc/graduate students, breakout sessions will actively engage the participant on provocative and real world energy topics such as:
Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center
CESP
Stanford University
Encina Hall E401
Stanford, CA 94305
Donald Kennedy is the editor-in-chief of Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a CESP senior fellow by courtesy. His present research program entails policy on such trans-boundary environmental problems as: major land-use changes; economically-driven alterations in agricultural practice; global climate change; and the development of regulatory policies.
Kennedy has served on the faculty of Stanford University from 1960 to the present. From 1980 to 1992 he served as President of Stanford University. He was Commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration from 1977-79. Previously at Stanford, he was as director of the Program in Human Biology from 1973-1977 and chair of the Department of Biology from 1964-1972.
Kennedy is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He served on the National Commission for Public Service and the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology and Government, and as a founding director of the Health Effects Institute. He currently serves as a director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and as co-chair of the National Academies' Project on Science, Technology and Law. Kennedy received AB and PhD degrees in biology from Harvard University.
Energy and Environment Building
473 Via Ortega
Stanford CA 94305
David Lobell is the Benjamin M. Page Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Earth System Science and the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. He is also the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy and Research (SIEPR).
Lobell's research focuses on agriculture and food security, specifically on generating and using unique datasets to study rural areas throughout the world. His early research focused on climate change risks and adaptations in cropping systems, and he served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report as lead author for the food chapter and core writing team member for the Summary for Policymakers. More recent work has developed new techniques to measure progress on sustainable development goals and study the impacts of climate-smart practices in agriculture. His work has been recognized with various awards, including the Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union (2010), a Macarthur Fellowship (2013), the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences (2022) and election to the National Academy of Sciences (2023).
Prior to his Stanford appointment, Lobell was a Lawrence Post-doctoral Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He holds a PhD in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University and a Sc.B. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University.
The Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki
Environment and Energy Building
Stanford University
473 Via Ortega, Office 363
Stanford, CA 94305
Rosamond Naylor is the William Wrigley Professor in Earth System Science, a Senior Fellow at Stanford Woods Institute and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the founding Director at the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and Professor of Economics (by courtesy) at Stanford University. She received her B.A. in Economics and Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado, her M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics, and her Ph.D. in applied economics from Stanford University. Her research focuses on policies and practices to improve global food security and protect the environment on land and at sea. She works with her students in many locations around the world. She has been involved in many field-level research projects around the world and has published widely on issues related to intensive crop production, aquaculture and livestock systems, biofuels, climate change, food price volatility, and food policy analysis. In addition to her many peer-reviewed papers, Naylor has published two books on her work: The Evolving Sphere of Food Security (Naylor, ed., 2014), and The Tropical Oil Crops Revolution: Food, Farmers, Fuels, and Forests (Byerlee, Falcon, and Naylor, 2017).
She is a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, a Pew Marine Fellow, a Leopold Leadership Fellow, a Fellow of the Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics, a member of Sigma Xi, and the co-Chair of the Blue Food Assessment. Naylor serves as the President of the Board of Directors for Aspen Global Change Institute, is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for Oceana and is a member of the Forest Advisory Panel for Cargill. At Stanford, Naylor teaches courses on the World Food Economy, Human-Environment Interactions, and Food and Security.
Collier, a distinguished economist and author of the award-winning book “The Bottom Billion”, was direct in his opening remarks.
“Smallholder agriculture has been a persistent productivity disaster for Africa,” said Collier. “Despite a huge land area to population ratio and higher proportion of its labor force engaged in food production, Africa is still not able to feed itself. The smallholder business model of the last 50 years is fundamentally flawed…maybe it is time for a Plan B.”
African agricultural productivity remains astoundingly low and stagnant at about $500 per person per year. His solution: debunk the ‘myth of the efficient peasant’ and rural romanticism and support commercial agriculture and urban growth.
Commercial agriculture reaps economies of scale that provide advantages often beyond reach for smallholder farmers yet are critical to agricultural production in Africa—risk finance, liquidity, technology, logistics, and knowledge of markets. Collier points to the success of Brazil and Thailand—two emerging economies that differ in scale of commercial organization, but have become major agricultural exporting countries.
Byerlee, a renowned economist and director of the 2008 World Development Report, agreed with Collier that commercial agriculture is likely Africa’s future, but that market-oriented smallholder farmers will play the lead role.
“We have much to learn from emerging business models,” said Byerlee. “Smallholders and agribusiness have complementary assets that can contribute to commercial agriculture, and states and investors must help facilitate smallholder inclusion in these models.”
Byerlee noted that the choice between small-scale or large-scale production models depend on transaction costs and type of commodity, and are context specific. Small- to medium scale production is best suited to most types of products in Africa especially food staples and many labor intensive products (e.g, diary). This follows the example of Thailand that not only has succeeded in food production but alone exports more than the value of all sub-Saharan Africa. Value chains that require stronger coordination with processing and shipping (e.g., sugar and palm oil), demand market standards (e.g, export horticulture) or are taking pioneering risks (e.g., new crops in new areas) may be better suited for large-scale production. Benefits may still be large if they create good jobs—a major challenge for Africa’s future.
Where to invest in Africa’s future?
"Young Africans are voting with their feet in droves to leave smallholder agriculture because it is impoverishing and boring, “ said Collier. “The economic tragedy for Africa is that cities haven’t been the engines of economic opportunity and wage employment.”
Collier argued investments in cities over agriculture are needed to prepare for an urban future and must be done quickly due to one dangerous fact—climate change.
“Climate change is the train coming down the tracks and it is already happening in Africa,” warned Collier. “The continuing deterioration of African agriculture is already set in stone. The last 50 years of carbon emissions are going to continue to devastate Africa’s climate over the next 50 years.”
Collier fears climate change will shift Africa’s competitive advantage in agriculture to Northern Eurasia and North America. Therefore, limited investment dollars must shift to cities which are more climate resilient. Byerlee disagrees.
“There is overwhelming and convincing evidence that agricultural growth is important for poverty reduction and food security,” said Byerlee. “Look at the Green Revolution in Asia and the institutional reforms in China in the early 1980s.”
The 2008 World Development Report also found GDP growth from agriculture benefits the income of the poor two to four times more than GDP growth from non-agriculture. So why isn’t this working for sub-Saharan Africa?
Byerlee points to Africa’s history of poor macroeconomic policies that have disadvantaged African farmers. Smallholder farmers have traditionally been taxed at high levels (as much as 50 percent 20 years ago before liberalization programs started kicking in). Rates have come down dramatically to 15-20 percent, but are still significantly higher than other countries.
“African states must level the playing field,” said Byerlee.
Government investment in public goods at four percent of agricultural GDP still lags behind that enjoyed by most other countries. That is less than half of what has been spent in Asia over the last couple of decades where investment in core public goods, R&D, rural roads, and irrigation have really made a difference.
Access to land and finance must also improve to support the growth of smallholder agribusiness. This especially includes secure, low cost, and transferrable land rights to allow efficient smallholders to expand.
Greater investment is also needed in technology and information. Research and development in Africa have been traditionally underfunded and understaffed. Despite involvement of agricultural research groups such as CGIAR over the last 40 years, only 35 percent of food crop area is planted to improved varieties. Smallholder farmers also often lack business development skills and access to primary education – a critical constraint to growth.
Reasons for optimismMany of these macropolicies are slowing changing, and that makes Collier and Byerlee hopeful.
“After four decades in sub-Saharan Africa I feel optimistic about Africa’s food systems and future,” said Byerlee. “I see exciting opportunities in terms of market growth, private interest, and improved policies.”
Yields in Africa are low, but there is room for significant improvement. The continent is home to potentially 240 million hectares of uncultivated land and less then 20 percent of irrigation potential has been tapped.
African agricultural systems are transforming rapidly in response to rising rates of income growth, urbanization, and shifts in demand for high value and processed food, and feed for livestock. Higher food prices are incentivizing farmers to enter the market and increasing farmer income. Regional markets now accounting for only 5-10% of trade have much potential to expand, and Byerlee projects the value of African urban food markets to quadruple over the next 20 years.
Renewed investment in Africa is another reason for optimism. After decades of declining support donor agencies are refocusing their efforts on supporting agricultural development in Africa. Private sector investment, ranging from local to foreign investors, is also increasing. Collier spoke of the value pioneer commercial investors are bringing to unused and underutilized, but arable lands in Africa. These larger investors are better able to internalize the benefits of infrastructure supply while creating jobs and opening new markets.
The spur in foreign investment has drawn some fire from opponents worried about ‘land grabbing’. Collier and Byerlee both pointed out the need to differentiate between commercial investors and land speculators. The latter are being scrutinized, and for good reason.
Land speculators are leasing huge tracts of land over long time horizons and banking on the land’s option value if there is a big spike in food prices. This takes potentially arable land out of near-term production and out of the hands of local communities. Byerlee suggests governments impose controls on how rapidly the land is developed as one way of managing this problem.
What will a successful African food system look like in 2050?
"African peasantry as we know it today will not be preserved," projects Collier.
“If commercialization is successful most Africans will live in big coastal cities like the US and Europe,” said Collier. “Most of the remaining rural population will move to the hinterland of the big cities, because profitable agriculture will be selling into the big cities from close vicinity."
He envisions a mixture of different types of commercial agriculture ranging from consolidated family farms as is the norm in the US to large-scale enterprises as seen Brazil, but agriculture will not employ a lot of people. He sees an opportunity for commercial agriculture to piggyback off the infrastructure put in place by extractive natural resource companies.
Byerlee foresees Africa headed down a path similar to Thailand where a more egalitarian, smallholder commercial farmer model dominates (2-5 hectares). Large-scale farming has a legacy of failure in Africa, he said. He sees better prospects for large-scale irrigated rice and perhaps oil palm. Oil palm was actually an African crop prior to moving primarily to Malaysia and Indonesia. The value of South East Asian exports of palm oil is now greater than all agricultural exports from sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, Africa now imports $3.5 billion in palm oil.
“With billions of dollars at stake, big Asian companies are investing in Africa with the potential to create millions of jobs,” said Byerlee. “Oil palm could be a really big opportunity to transform African agriculture in the humid tropics, but state support is needed to facilitate inclusion of smallholders and safeguard social and environmental standards."
Africa has the natural resources to become a major player in the global agricultural export market and to bring down its alarmingly high malnutrition and poverty rates. What’s needed now is the political will, guidance, and investment to make that happen.
Currently, more than two-thirds of the population in Africa must leave their home to fetch water for drinking and domestic use. The time burden of water fetching has been suggested to influence the volume of water collected by households as well as time spent on income generating activities and child care. However, little is known about the potential health benefits of reducing water fetching distances. Data from almost 200 000 Demographic and Health Surveys carried out in 26 countries were used to assess the relationship between household walk time to water source and child health outcomes. To estimate the causal effect of decreased water fetching time on health, geographic variation in freshwater availability was employed as an instrumental variable for one-way walk time to water source in a two-stage regression model. Time spent walking to a household’s main water source was found to be a significant determinant of under-five child health. A 15-min decrease in one-way walk time to water source is associated with a 41% average relative reduction in diarrhea prevalence, improved anthropometric indicators of child nutritional status, and a 11% relative reduction in under-five child mortality. These results suggest that reducing the time cost of fetching water should be a priority for water infrastructure investments in Africa.
Freshwater scarcity has been cited as the major crisis of the 21st century, but it is surprisingly hard to describe the nature of the global water crisis. We conducted a meta- analysis of 22 coupled human–water system case studies, using qualitative comparison analysis (QCA) to identify water resource system outcomes and the factors that drive them. The cases exhibited different outcomes for human wellbeing that could be grouped into a six “syndromes”: groundwater depletion, ecological destruction, drought-driven conflicts, unmet subsistence needs, resource capture by elite, and water reallocation to nature. For syndromes that were not successful adaptations, three characteristics gave cause for concern: (1) unsustainability—a decline in the water stock or ecosystem function that could result in a long-term steep decline in future human wellbeing; (2) vulnerability—high variability in water resource availability combined with inadequate coping capacity, leading to temporary drops in human wellbeing; (3) chronic scarcity—persistent inadequate access and hence low conditions of human wellbeing. All syndromes could be explained by a limited set of causal factors that fell into four categories: demand changes, supply changes, governance systems, and infrastructure/technology. By considering basins as members of syndrome classes and tracing common causal pathways of water crises, water resource analysts and planners might develop improved water policies aimed at reducing vulnerability, inequity, and unsustainability of freshwater systems.