Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) has received a $2 million grant from Cargill, a second gift from the company that raises its total contribution to FSE to $5 million over 10 years.

The announcement was made Nov. 10 at a dinner celebrating the launch of FSE as a full-scale research center. FSE has more than doubled in size in five years. Because of its growth and increasing importance of food security issues at Stanford and worldwide, it became an official center in September.

“The center’s rapid growth would not have been possible without the generous support of Cargill,” FSE Director and William Wrigley Senior Fellow Rosamond L. Naylor said. “Cargill’s initial investment provided seed-funding for the bold, new research and teaching that was happening at FSE while keeping our lights on and the staff running during our critical years of early development.”

A $3 million grant from Cargill in 2008 jump-started a visiting fellows program at FSE and helped build the infrastructure to support the center’s research.

The new grant will continue to provide program support, but will also be used to hire younger faculty and scholars to Stanford to work within the new Center.

Stanford-Cargill partnership

Stanford's partnership with Cargill extends back to 1976 when Cargill endowed Walter P. Falcon, then Director of Stanford's Food Research Institute and now FSE Deputy Director, with the Helen C. Farnsworth Professorship in International Agricultural Policy. The gift was intended to strengthen Stanford's work in agricultural policy, specifically as it relates to the international grain economy. FSI senior fellow Scott Rozelle now holds the Helen C. Farnsworth chair.

FSE and Cargill remain committed to helping feed a growing population while preserving the planet's natural resources. FSE is an applied group focused on providing real solutions to important food and agricultural issues.

“Poverty is the main issue driving food insecurity—it’s a question of access rather than food availability,” Naylor said.

FSE’s partnership with Cargill has demonstrated how Stanford-based research can be relevant to the private sector. FSE is conducting ongoing research on oil palm and land use issues in Indonesia that is helping inform and shape policy. Work on aquaculture feeds in China is another overlapping area of interest, as are ongoing assessments of biofuels in the U.S., Africa and Asia. Both have a stake in better understanding climate change impacts on agriculture and food commodity price volatility.

“It is clear to us at FSE—and increasingly to leadership of Stanford—that global food security will remain a critical issue within international policy circles,” said Naylor. “With support like the grant from Cargill, we are confident that Stanford can play a leading role in shaping the future policy discourse.”

Blaming leaders in America and abroad for not doing enough to combat climate change, former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said continued failure to tackle the problem will result in worldwide hunger, social unrest and political turmoil.

“Without action at the global level to address climate change, we will see farmers across Africa – and in many other parts of the world including here in America – forced to leave their land,” the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize winner told a crowd of about 1,400 people at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium on Thursday. “The result will be mass migration, growing food shortages, loss of social cohesion and even political instability.”

Citing numbers from the World Bank, Annan said rapidly rising food prices since 2010 have “pushed an additional 70 million people into extreme poverty.” He called a lack of food security for nearly 1 billion of the world’s population “an unconscionable moral failing” that is also a stumbling block to a strong international economy.

“It affects everything from the health of an unborn child to economic growth,” he said.

Annan’s talk, “Food Security Is a Global Challenge,” was delivered as part of a daylong conference on global underdevelopment sponsored by Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. The event drew the world’s leading experts in the field and featured panel discussions that explored the connections between global security and food supplies, health care and governance. Keynote speeches were delivered by Annan and Jeff Raikes, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates also planned to deliver a talk to a private audience.

The conference marked the launch of FSI’s Center on Food Security and the Environment.

“With this facility, and the creative thinkers and inquisitive minds for which Stanford is famous, you are well-equipped to undertake research which advances our knowledge and helps to shape our response to the many global challenges we face,” Annan said. “And with the resources at your disposal, you also have the capacity to actively engage to influence policy, implement solutions and thus improve the lives of the most vulnerable people on the planet.”

Annan also lauded government initiatives such as America’s Feed the Future program that focus on alleviating global hunger. He recently met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Raj Shah, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, to discuss ways to address food insecurity.

“If we pool our efforts and resources, we can finally break the back of this problem,” he said.

But he challenged wealthier nations to do more than pay lip service to the problem.

“We need to make sure that promises of extra support from richer countries are kept and involve fresh funds rather than the repackaging of existing financial commitments,” he said.

Annan, who is the chair of the Kofi Annan Foundation, the Africa Progress Panel, and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, said Africa represents both the greatest problem and the greatest promise when it comes to food security.

The continent is home to 60 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land, but cannot produce enough food to feed its own people, he said. But if Africa can grow just half the world’s average yield of staple crops like wheat, corn and rice, it would end up with a food surplus.

Transforming Africa into one of the world’s biggest crop producers will take more than supporting farmers, he said. It entails sound environmental stewardship.

 “I hope this is an area where the Center on Food Security and the Environment can make a major contribution to finding solutions,” Annan said.

Without those solutions, the future is bleak.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, where global warming brings the threat of persistent drought, current crop production is expected to be cut in half by the end of the century and 8 percent of the region’s fertile land is expected to dry up.

“Those arguing, here and elsewhere, for urgent action and a focus on opportunities to green our economies still find themselves drowned out by those with short-term and vested interests,” Annan said. “This lack of long-term collective vision and leadership is inexcusable. It has global repercussions, and it will be those least responsible for climate change – the poorest and most vulnerable – that will pay the highest price.”

Annan's speech was sponsored by FSI, Stanford in Government and the Stanford University Speakers Bureau.

Over much of the world, the growing season of 2050 will probably be warmer than the hottest of recent years, with more variable rainfall. If we continue to grow the same crops in the same way, climate change will contribute to yield declines in many places. With potentially less food to feed more people, we have no choice but to adapt agriculture to the new conditions.

To some extent, adaptation can be done by moving crops to more favourable areas and by agronomic tweaks. But that will almost certainly not be enough. We will have to give crops a genetic helping hand, infusing them with new genes to allow them to better cope with new climates, and the new pests and diseases they will bring. Where are these genes going to come from?

Some of them could come from completely unrelated organisms, to be spliced into their new genomic homes using advanced biotechnologies. However, there is significant public resistance to that strategy, and it is still unclear how effective genetically modified crops are at coping with heat and drought. We cannot risk putting all our eggs in that basket.

Another source of genes for crop improvement are traditional heirloom varieties, often called landraces, which are still grown by subsistence farmers in many parts of the world, although they are fast disappearing. Large collections of their seeds have been made over the years, creating genebanks that are scoured by plant breeders searching for crop diversity, and which helped spur the Green Revolution in agriculture from the late 1960s.

But there’s a limit to the diversity found in domesticated species, imposed by domestication itself. Cultivated species usually contain a fraction of the genetic diversity found in their closest wild relatives — a legacy of the ‘domestication bottleneck’. Ancient farmers selected relatively few plants from the progenitors of modern crops, in a limited number of places. Although there has been continuous gene flow between crops and their wild relatives where they coexist, a lot of genetic diversity has been lost as agriculture has developed.

We know that the ‘lost’ genetic diversity includes genes for resistance to high temperatures and drought, and to pests and diseases, as well as taste and nutritional composition, and even yield. If there was ever a time to go back and reclaim this diversity, that time is now. In fact, it is already being used more than many people realize. For instance, there is probably no widely grown rice cultivar that does not have some genes obtained by breeders from its wild relatives. But we could be making much more effective, and systematic, use of the reservoir of diversity our Neolithic ancestors left behind.

To read the full commentary, click here.

Feeding a growing population in a hotter world will require exploiting a far broader range of crop diversity than now — and that means valuing wild genes.

Over much of the world, the growing season of 2050 will probably be warmer than the hottest of recent years, with more variable rainfall. If we continue to grow the same crops in the same way, climate change will contribute to yield declines in many places. With potentially less food to feed more people, we have no choice but to adapt agriculture to the new conditions.

To some extent, adaptation can be done by moving crops to more favourable areas and by agronomic tweaks. But that will almost certainly not be enough. We will have to give crops a genetic helping hand, infusing them with new genes to allow them to better cope with new climates, and the new pests and diseases they will bring. Where are these genes going to come from?

U.S. ethanol policy may be the single most significant contributor to world food price instability, states a Stanford study on the global costs of American ethanol. The rapid rise of biofuels has tied energy and agricultural markets together, making it difficult to assess one without understanding the other.

The price of corn recently hit an all time high, a departure from a long-term trend that has seen the cost of corn decline with each passing decade. Price spikes have happened before, and some experts viewed the latest jump as part of this familiar cycle. Stanford food policy economists Rosamond L. Naylor and Walter P. Falcon alternatively argue in a new paper released in The American Interest that we have entered a new era where agricultural commodity prices are increasingly driven by U.S. biofuel policies. This food and fuel linkage has, and will continue to have, major implications for global food prices and the world’s poor.

Over the last decade, the U.S. ethanol industry experienced a major increase in production and consumption as a result of beneficiary of tax breaks, tariffs and government mandates. In 2005, MTBE was phased out as a gasoline additive because of environmental and health risks, and ethanol became the preferred MTBE substitute. Production was further supported with a mandate to reach a minimum target of 15 billion gallons by 2015. 

A jump in the price of crude oil gave a further boost to ethanol as a potential replacement for petroleum. As a result, 40% of the U.S. corn crop is now devoted to ethanol production. These policies have been promoted under the banner of protecting the American farm industry, securing energy independence, and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, and they have succeeded on a number of these fronts.

However, as a major global producer and exporter of corn, the rapid rise of ethanol production in the U.S. during such a short period of time has produced a fundamental change in the structure of demand for corn. Increased demand has led to higher and more volatile food prices, not only for corn but other agricultural commodities. If the United States, along with the rest of the G-20, is serious about stabilizing global food prices, U.S. domestic biofuels policy in its entirety will need to be re-examined.

High prices are a boon to the U.S. farm sector, but can be devastating for poor consumers with minimal income to spend on food. Food riots have broken out in several countries suggesting the new volatility in the price of staple crops has had a severe impact on developing economies. Where once the policies of the U.S. helped keep agricultural prices on an even keel, current support for the production of corn-based ethanol has reversed this stabilizing role. 

Given the bullish financial outlook for the U.S. agricultural sector, this is an ideal time to begin dismantling both ethanol and corn (and other major commodity) subsidies. Corn-based ethanol tax and tariff provisions together cost the federal government around $6 billion annually. Cutting these subsidies would help reduce the Federal budget deficit without harming the rural economy.

The trickier political and economic questions relate to reassessing mandates, and are likely off the table with the 2012 elections approaching. This is unfortunate, for these policies will continue to cause unrest in food markets far beyond American shores.