Stanford University

Poverty

Thomas Hertel

Center on Food Security and the Environment
473 Via Ortega, room 365
Stanford, CA 94305-4205

(650) 721-2203
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Cargill Visiting Fellow
thomas_hertel.jpg PhD

Hertel is a Distinguished Professor of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University. His research focuses on the economy-wide impacts of global trade and environmental policies with a particular interest in the impacts of energy and climate policies on global land use and poverty. He is also Executive Director, and founder of the Center for Global Trade Analysis, and Past-President of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA).

During his stay at Stanford he undertook research into the impacts of climate change and climate policy on agriculture, food security and poverty. In the winter quarter he co-taught an FSE seminar (with David Lobell) on the long run determinants of global agricultural land use.

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Rural Health & Development at the Food-Water Nexus

More than two-thirds of the population in Africa must leave their home to fetch water for drinking and domestic use. It is estimated that some 40 billion hours of labor each year are spent hauling water, a responsibility often borne by women and children. Cutting the walking time to a water source by just 15 minutes can reduce under-five mortality of children by 11 percent, and slash the prevalence of nutrition-depleting diarrhea by 41 percent.

Assisting the escape from persistent ultra-poverty in rural Africa

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This paper was prepared for Stanford University’s Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series, hosted by the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is home to two-thirds of the world’s ultra-poor today. This paper offers current thinking on the structural causes of the spatially concentrated, persistent ultra-poverty that has plagued Africa for a generation and some key entry points for facilitating Africans’ escape from persistent ultra-poverty.

The increased recognition of persistent ultra-poverty has rekindled long-dormant interest in poverty traps. The essence of a poverty trap is that there exists one or more low equilibrium level(s) of well-being in which people appear caught unnecessarily. Small adjustments fail to move people out of those equilibria sustainably. Rather, systems must change, major positive shocks must occur, or both. And in the absence of systemic change, recurring adverse shocks only drive more people into the trap.

The ultra-poverty trap that characterizes much of rural SSA today is intimately caught up with (i) the bidirectional interrelationship among hunger, ill-health, low productivity, weak institutions and natural resources degradation, all of which become manifest in low incomes, (ii) poor initial conditions associated with health and nutrition, especially early in childhood, but also with the state of infrastructure and the natural resource base on which rural livelihood disproportionately depend, and (iii) uninsured risk exposure, which is especially severe in rural areas and in agriculture. The closely coupled nature of these problems adds substantially to the challenge of addressing any one of them on its own and thereby makes integrated strategies essential. 

The available theory and evidence suggests that the policy focus must fall squarely on stimulating a smallholder food productivity revolution. Toward that end, the paper concludes by identifying and explaining key entry points for assisting the escape from persistent ultra-poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.

  1. Build and protect the productive asset endowments of the ultra-poor
  2. Improve the productivity of the ultra-poor’s current asset holdings
  3. Improve risk management options for the ultra-poor
  4. Facilitate favorable transitions out of agriculture

Although the topic of persistent ultra-poverty would seem to lend itself to a pessimistic ending, the future for Africa is actually rather hopeful. The East Asian experience demonstrates that mass, rapid escape from persistent ultra-poverty is feasible. Real agricultural output growth rates are accelerating in SSA, nearly doubling from the 1980s rate so that per capita food output is growing again, helping reduce rural poverty rates in countries enjoying increased agricultural productivity. Finally, the  policymaking and donor communities are now appropriately focusing on how best to stimulate investment incentives, productivity growth, risk management and productive transitions out of agriculture. These broad foci are appropriate and reasonably well-grounded in both theory and empirical evidence.  

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Books
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Center on Food Security and the Environment
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African Agricultural R&D and Productivity Growth in a Global Setting

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Food and agricultural policy experts Prabhu Pingali and Philip Pardey will each speak on trends in productivity and investments in technology, survey of constraints to productivity, incentives and investment, and opportunities to raise productivity.

The Green Revolution - past successes, unfinished business, and the way forward

Pingali will review strategic components of the Green Revolution and its achievement and limits in terms of agricultural productivity improvement and broader impact at social, environmental and economic levels, including its impact on food and nutrition security. Lessons learned and the strategic insights these provide will be reviewed as the world is preparing a "redux" version of the Green Revolution with more integrative environmental and social impact combined with agricultural and economic development. Pingali will also point to core research & policy gaps that can enhance further spread and sustainable adoption of productivity enhancing technologies.

Prabhu Pingali is the Deputy Director of Agricultural Development at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Formerly, he served as Director of the Agricultural and Development Economics Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. Pingali was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences as a Foreign Associate in May 2007, and he was elected Fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association in 2006. Pingali was the President of the International Association of Agricultural Economists (IAAE) from 2003-06. Pingali has over twenty five years of experience in assessing the extent and impact of technical change in agriculture in developing countries, including Asia, Africa and Latin America.

 African Agricultural R&D and Productiivity Growth in a Global Setting

Given the continuing importance of agriculture in most African economies, an in-depth understanding of the past and likely future productivity performance of African agriculture is key to assessing the overall economic growth and development prospects of the region. African agriculture operates in increasingly interconnected global commodity markets, so the relative productivity performance of African vis-à-vis rest-of-world agriculture is also relevant. This talk will present new evidence on African agricultural productivity performance and place that evidence in relation to the evolving pattern of agricultural productivity growth worldwide. Technological change is a principal driver of productivity growth, and new, updated evidence on the trends in R&D investments that give rise to these technological changes will also be presented and discussed. The productivity effects of R&D play out over comparatively long periods of time demanding a long-run look at these developments.    
 

Philip Pardey is Professor of Science and Technology Policy in the Department of Applied Economics, and Director of the University of Minnesota's International Science and Technology Practice and Policy (InSTePP) center. His research deals with the finance and conduct of R&D globally, methods for assessing the economic impacts of research, and the economic and policy (especially intellectual property) aspects of genetic resources and the biosciences. He is a Fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association and a Distinguished Fellow of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society.

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Prabhu Pingali Deputy director, Agricultural Development Speaker Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Philip Pardey Professor of Science and Technology, Applied Economics Speaker University of Minnesota
Symposiums
Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series

Climate volatility and poverty vulnerability in Tanzania

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Climate volatility could change in the future, with important implications for agricultural productivity. For Tanzania, where food production and prices are sensitive to climate, changes in climate volatility could have severe implications for poverty. This study uses climate model projections, statistical crop models, and general equilibrium economic simulations to determine how the vulnerability of Tanzania's population to impoverishment by climate variability could change between the late 20th Century and the early 21st Century. Under current climate volatility, there is potential for a range of possible poverty outcomes, although in the most extreme of circumstances, poverty could increase by as many as 650,000 people due to an extreme interannual decline in grain yield. However, scenarios of future climate from multiple climate models indicate no consensus on future changes in temperature or rainfall volatility, so that either an increase or decrease is plausible. Scenarios with the largest increases in climate volatility are projected to render Tanzanians increasingly vulnerable to poverty through impacts on staple grains production in agriculture, with as many as 90,000 additional people entering poverty on average. Under the scenario where precipitation volatility decreases, poverty vulnerability decreases, highlighting the possibility of climate changes that oppose the ensemble mean, leading to poverty impacts of opposite sign. The results suggest that evaluating potential changes in volatility and not just the mean climate state may be important for analyzing the poverty implications of climate change.

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Global Environmental Change
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Thomas Hertel
David Lobell
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Emerging Land Issues in African Agriculture: Toward the identification of appropriate rural development strategies

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Thom Jayne, Professor of International Development from Michigan State University will answer the following questions: What are the trends in land access? How can smallholder farmers get higher value out of scarce land and how does that relate to food and non-food markets? Smallholder vs. large enterprises in Africa. Derek Byerlee, independent scholar and director of the 2009 World Development Report will provide additional commentary.

Thomas Jayne's professional career has been devoted to promoting effective policy responses to poverty and hunger in Africa. Jayne is Professor, International Development, in the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics and a member of the Core Faculty of the African Studies Center at Michigan State University. He is involved in research, outreach, and capacity building programs in collaboration with African universities and government agencies, mainly focusing on food marketing and trade policies and their effects on sustainable and equitable development. Jayne's secondary research focus has been on measuring the current and long-term effects of HIV/AIDS on African agriculture. Jayne sits on the editorial boards of two development journals, received a top paper award in 2004 by the International Association of Agricultural Economists, co-authored a paper (with graduate student Jacob Ricker-Gilbert) awarded the T.W. Schultz Award at the 2009 International Association of Agricultural Economists Triennial Meetings, and received the 2009 Best Article Award in Agricultural Economics (with co-authors Xhying Xu, William Burke, and Jones Govereh). Jayne's work has also been recognized at the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome and the Secretariat of Global Agricultural Science Policy for the Twenty-First Century.

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Thom Jayne Professor of International Development Speaker Michigan State University
Derek Byerlee Independent Scholar and Director, World Development Report, 2009 Commentator
Symposiums
Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series

Assisting the Escape from Persistent Ultra-Poverty in Rural Africa

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Christopher Barrett reviews the evidence on persistent poverty with a focus on rural Africa. He emphasizes the importance of asset accumulation, productivity growth, risk management and the sociopolitical institutions that govern economic activity. Barrett's talk synthesizes lessons learned about what works, what doesn't and why, and identifies key topics in need of further investigation.

William Masters, Professor of Food Policy in the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts University, will join the conversation as a discussant following Barrett's presentation. 

Biography

Christopher Barrett is the Stephen B. & Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management and International Professor of Agriculture at Cornell University. He teaches and does research primarily in poverty and international development. His research program also has strong links to international, agricultural, environmental and micro economics as well as to applied econometrics. He is a Faculty Fellow and Associate Director, Economic Development Programs, at the new Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future. The Center is a major Cornell initiative aimed at promoting cutting-edge research on sustainable development in collaboration with key external partners to achieve significant real-world impact. He is also the Director of Cornell's Food Systems and Poverty Reduction IGERT program.

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Christopher Barrett Stephen B. & Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management, International Professor of Agriculture Speaker Cornell University
William Masters Professor of Food Policy Commentator Friedman School of Nutrition, Tufts
Symposiums
Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series

Why Has Africa Been Slow in Developing its Agriculture?

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Ousmane Badiane, Director for Africa at IFPRI, will talk about the investment and policy strategies needed for a dynamic agricultural sector, and how conditions in Africa differ from those in Asia.

Peter Timmer, Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Development Studies, Emeritus, at Harvard University, will join the conversation as a discussant following the main presentation.

Biography

Dr. Ousmane Badiane is the Africa Director for the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). In this role, he coordinates IFPRI's work program in the areas of food policy research, capacity strengthening, and policy communications in Africa. He is also in charge of IFPRI's partnerships with African institutions dealing with the above areas.

Dr. Badiane, a national of Senegal, was Lead Specialist for Food and Agricultural Policy for the Africa Region at the World Bank from January 1998 to August 2008. He previously worked at IFPRI as Senior Research Fellow from 1989 to 1997, when he led the institute's work on market reforms and development. While at IFPRI, he taught, as adjunct professor, at Johns Hopkins' School of Advance International Studies from 1993 to 2003. Dr. Badiane received a Masters Degree and PhD in agricultural economics from the University of Kiel in Germany.

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Ousmane Badiane Director for Africa Speaker IFPRI

Peter Timmer

Center on Food Security and the Environment
Encina Hall East, E400
Stanford, CA 94305

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Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Development Studies, Emeritus, Harvard University
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C. Peter Timmer was a visiting professor at Stanford's Center on Food Security and the Environment in 2007. He is a leading authority on agriculture and rural development who has published widely on these topics. He has served as a professor at Stanford, Cornell, three faculties at Harvard, and the University of California, San Diego, where he was also the dean of the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. A core advisor on the World Bank's World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development, Timmer also works with several Asian governments on domestic policy responses to instability in the global rice market. In 1992, he received the Bintang Jasa Utama (Highest Merit Star) from the Republic of Indonesia for his contributions to food security. He is an advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on agricultural development issues.

Timmer's work focuses on three broad topics: the nature of "pro-poor growth" and its application in Indonesia and other countries in Asia; the supermarket revolution in developing countries and its impact on the poor (both producers and consumers); and the structural transformation in historical perspective as a framework for understanding the political economy of agricultural policy. 

Peter Timmer Speaker
Symposiums
Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series
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