Indonesia’s rainforests are among the world’s most extensive and biologically diverse environments. They are also among the most threatened. An increasing population and growing economy have led to rapid development. Logging, mining, colonization, and subsistence activities have all contributed to deforestation.

But the recent and booming expansion of palm oil plantations could cause the most harm to the rainforests, and is generating considerable concern and debate among industry leaders, environmental campaigners and scholars.

Joanne Gaskell in Sumatra, Indonesia.

Joanne Gaskell has dedicated her graduate studies to better understanding the tradeoffs and demand side of this dilemma. The doctoral candidate and researcher for the Center on Food Security and the Environment recently defended her thesis before an audience of advisers, friends, and fellow students from Stanford’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER).

“You need to understand the economics and politics of palm oil demand if you want to understand the regional dynamics of oil production and associated environmental impacts,” Gaskell said. “From a conservation perspective, this is as important as understanding supply since demand patterns affect the incentives facing producers.”

In the past 25 years, palm oil has become the world’s leading source of vegetable oil. Indonesia is currently the world’s top palm oil producer. Since the 1980s total land area planted to palm oil has increased by over 2,100 percent growing to 4.6 million hectares – the equivalent of six Yosemite National Parks. Plantation growth has predominately occurred on deforested native rainforest with major implications for global carbon emissions and biodiversity.

And Gaskell projects the demand for palm oil for food will double by 2035, requiring more than 8 million new hectares for production. Plantation expansion has already begun in Kalimantan and Papua, and Indonesian companies are now looking beyond Indonesia for new investment opportunities. Just as palm oil production spread from Malaysia to Indonesia to escape rising land and labor costs, palm oil production is now spreading to parts of Africa, where the crop is native, and Latin America.

Demand for palm oil is quickly rising in Asian markets – notably India and China – where it is used for cooking and industrial processes. Indonesia has the highest level of per capita palm oil consumption, resulting not just from population and income growth, but also from government policies that promoted the use of palm oil instead of coconut cooking oil.

“Taste preferences and investment more than international prices have driven palm oil demand in Indonesia,” Gaskell said.

Biodiesel production and speculation have also contributed to the rapid expansion of palm oil plantations, but to a lesser extent. Gaskell said the success of palm-based biodiesel hinges on remaining cheaper than petroleum diesel and whether governments subsidize the industry, as the United States has done with corn and soybean farmers.

Interest in palm oil as a cleaner burning fuel is already waning in Europe and the United States. The short-term carbon costs of deforesting and preparing land, fertilizing and managing the crops, then processing and transporting them outweigh the benefits. This is particularly true when palm oil plantations are grown on peat soils that release potent methane gas when drained for growing palm oil.

Palm oil seedlings ready for planting. Photo credit: Wakx/flikr

Growing plantations on ‘degraded land’, land that had been previously converted for other purposes, such as logging, is a much more favorable option over forest expansion. In theory, there is an abundance of degraded areas that can be profitably converted into palm oil plantations. But there are hurdles: The areas are not necessarily contiguous, making it difficult to organize a plantation, and ownership rights in these areas are often contested.

Palm oil’s considerable productivity and profitability offers wealth and development where help is most needed. Half of Indonesia’s population lives on less than $2 a day. But along with the negative ecological impacts, palm oil production increases competition for land and could exacerbate inequalities between the rich and the poor.

Gaskell believes sustainable expansion strategies are possible, and says smaller mills and different processing technologies are needed so production is affordable in scaled-down, more distributed systems.

Palm oil plantation in Cigudeg, Indonesia. Photo credit:  Achmad Rabin Taim/flickr

Her work is feeding an international conversation about palm oil production. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), an international organization of producers, distributors, conservationists and other stakeholders, has promoted better ways of managing palm oil production and encouraging transparency and dialogue among corporate players, governments, and NGOs.

“We need to protect the most ecologically valuable landscapes from agricultural production and we need to make sure that, in areas where palm oil agriculture occurs, there are ecological management strategies in place such as riparian buffers, wildlife corridors, and treatment systems for mill effluent,” she said. “From a food security perspective, small palm oil producers, who might be giving up rice production or the production of other food staples, need strategies to minimize the economic risk associated with fluctuating global palm oil prices.” 

Despite accelerating economic growth in India over the last thirty years, India’s structural transformation remains stunted, said economist Hans Binswanger-Mkhize at a May 10 FSE symposium on global food policy and food security. Unlike China, urban migration and labor absorption have been slower than expected, especially in the typically labor-intensive manufacturing sector. Formal sector jobs are few and declining as a share of employment, and agricultural employment (and growth) remains low.

The rural non-farm sector has been left to pick up the slack, and has emerged as the largest source of new jobs in the Indian economy. This will likely remain so over the next few decades given that two-thirds of India’s growing population is projected to live in rural areas. Add to the equation the need to increase crop yields by 50 percent under changing climate conditions and it becomes apparent that improving rural incomes and supporting agricultural growth is essential to decreasing poverty and unemployment in India now and in the future.

“The importance of India's rural non-farm sector shows us that structural transformation does not follow a recipe,” said commentator Marianne Banziger, a senior scientist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico.

While non-farm jobs offer significantly higher wages than farm labor, most jobs are informal and/or insecure (i.e., no health benefits, unemployment insurance or pensions). These jobs go mostly to men 18-26 years old who have some education, while the illiterate and women struggle to transition into this sector. Retail trade and transport, construction, and services (internet and phone booths, maintenance and repair of motor vehicles, and hotels and restaurants) are growing especially fast, partly due to urban-rural spillovers, but manufacturing is still only 20 percent of non-farm jobs.

“For rural households, non-farm employment is not distress employment, but a profitable diversification strategy,” said Binswanger-Mkhize. “At the same time, it has selectively absorbed young males into wage employment, decreased the number of farmers, and increasingly concentrated women in agriculture, contributing to a progressive feminization of agriculture.” 

As a result, farms on average have declined in both land and household size, and have moved toward the production of higher-valued goods and a modern model of part-time farming. This transformation concerned Banziger.

“Will the urban and land-less poor be held hostage by part-time farmers?” she asked.

Banziger projects in the next 20 years food and energy price inflation will likely exceed the income growth of the urban poor. Food price increases will push net consumers, who spend a third of their income on food staples, back into poverty.

“For food prices to remain constant, farmers yield gains will have to increase by 50 percent on essentially the same land area, with less water, nutrients, energy, labor and as climate changes,” said Banziger. "The more we delay investments, the steeper the challenge.”

Fortunately, small farmers are now better equipped to respond to these challenges, but are still limited by scale. Precision irrigation and fertilization technology coupled with remote sensing and cell phone technology enable better yield predictions that affect nutrient application. Better farm-level nutrient management increases farmer income and nutrient use efficiency.

For an optimistic Indian future to be realized government policy must support ways in which households increase their incomes, said Binswanger-Mkhize. A positive outcome for rural areas depends on continued urban spillovers, and on better agriculture and rural development policies, institutions, and programs.

Productivity growth needs to be sustained at very high levels. This requires more responsive, accountable, and better-financed research systems, more diversification of agriculture, and larger, better financed, and more accountable agricultural extension system. India currently employs one-seventh the number of extension workers as China.

"Rapid policy and institutional change will be required to overcome poor performance of many government programs," said Binswanger-Mkhize. "Current subsidies to fertilizer, electricity, water, and support to crop prices are already large, but are an inefficient means to transfer income to farmers."

Direct payments may be a more efficient way of supporting income growth. This is beginning to happen with fertilizers, but should be extended to electricity and food subsidies, said Binswanger-Mkhize.

“Maybe the people who have been disadvantaged in the past are the core for future change. With appropriate support, smallholder farmers can become the engines for agricultural productivity growth and transform India's growing economy,” concluded Banziger. 

Agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa remains significantly less than the rest of the world, and 25 percent of people in the region still suffer from an insufficient dietary intake of calories. Yet sub-Saharan Africa has more arable land than Asia or Latin America, and a more diverse set of cereal grains. Agriculture also accounts for 20-25 percent of GDP for the region compared with only five percent for the rest of the world.

So why is productivity in sub-Saharan Africa so low when agriculture is such a big part of the economy, asked Rosamond L. Naylor, director of the Center on Food Security Environment at last week’s Connecting the Dots conference. Lack of irrigation is part of the problem. 95 percent of farms in sub-Saharan Africa are rainfed and rely on water from a short, 4-5 month rainy season. 

“During the rainy season kids are fed pretty well,” explained Naylor. “But during the peak of the dry season up to one-third of children are severely malnourished in parts of West Africa where we have been working.”

Sub-Saharan Africa has largely missed out on the benefits of the Green Revolution that increased crop production in Asia two to three fold. Asia’s heavily irrigated agriculture took advantage of new crop varieties that were bred to take up nutrients with sufficient water availability. Groundwater sources in sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand, are more fractured and not well understood, and surface water isn’t necessarily close to where the people are.

“But Africa has water” said Naylor. “Groundwater resources have not been sufficiently explored and rivers such as the Nile and Niger remain underutilized due to a mindset that irrigation systems must be large scale.”

This requires big investments and institutional involvement that have thus far not resulted in great payoffs. Corruption in some areas coupled with institutional and tribal issues have also contributed to failed investments.

“We need to change our investment strategies from large-scale to small-scale irrigation systems,” suggested Naylor. “Evaluate the returns from treadle, solar-power, and diesel pumps to see what works where, so that we stop investments that aren’t working and support investments where they are.”

Treadle pumps can work well if they are close to surface water, but require a lot of labor, explained Naylor. There is a huge energetic cost and an opportunity cost for someone to work the treadle pump, so it is necessary to ‘get the right technology to suit the water and labor conditions’.

Irrigation is not just about access (drawing water). It is also necessary to think about how to best distribute that water to crops (e.g. drip irrigation) and what you use them on. Production of leafy greens, for example, leads to higher income and nutritional returns.

FSE’s solar market garden project in Benin is a good example of where appropriate technologies are being applied in a cost-effective manner. Solar-powered, drip irrigation pumps have improved incomes and nutrition for participating farming groups through the year-round production of high-value crops. Proven to be a viable and profitable investment, the project is now scaling up in other villages in Benin and West Africa.

“According to the World Bank, investment in agriculture is the best bang for your buck than any other investment,” said panel moderator Jenna Davis, assistant professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering and affiliated FSE fellow.

Fortunately, the World Bank is beginning to recognize the viability and efficiency of investments in small-scale irrigation projects. NGOs and academia also have a role to play in facilitating these projects. Through these partnerships and shifts in investment strategies, the development community has a better chance of improving access to freshwater resources for some of the world’s most vulnerable and effectively addressing sub-Saharan Africa's water and food security crisis.

In the first decade of the 21^st century, global production of ethanol and biodiesel increased nearly tenfold. If that trend continues, says Rosamond L. Naylor, director of Stanford University’s Center on Food Security and the Environment, national biofuels policies will have an increasingly powerful impact on food prices, food security, energy security, and rural incomes in the developing world.

During a two-hour symposium held on the Stanford campus last Wednesday, Naylor addressed the role of biofuels in global food price volatility and the implications of biofuels development in rural Africa and Asia. Although she acknowledged that global income and population growth have contributed to increased demand for biofuels, she also emphasized “the unbelievable dominance of policy” in driving current trends.

“The main part of this that I think is so significant is the use of mandates,” Naylor said. “Policies such as the United States’ Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS), which sets a national target of using 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol per year by 2015, have reshaped price and supply dynamics in both food and fuel markets. “

“When you think about the fact that the US provides half of the world’s corn…the fact that we’re using so much in our gas tanks, biofuels really is changing the nature of global markets,” Naylor said. Policies that fix demand for corn from the ethanol market, she explained, have a destabilizing effect on corn prices, especially in the face of supply shortages.

“When you have mandates you have a quantity that you’re absolutely insisting you use, regardless of the price,” she said. “That inelastic demand leads to more volatile prices with supply shocks.”

Because of the substitutability of basic food commodities, Naylor said, price volatility in the corn market has far-reaching consequences. “Prices of corn ripple through all of the world food economy markets…it affects the demand and supply of wheat and rice and soy, and other things,” she explained. And for poor households in the developing world, she said, “it has big income effects…when you’re spending 70 to 80 percent of your budget on food, you’re going to be hurt the most.”

However, Naylor also noted that biofuel mandates in the developed world could provide valuable market opportunities for developing-country farmers.

In rural Africa and Asia, she said, farmers “see the US having a big mandate, EU having a big mandate, and they think, can they supply into that mandated need?”

For now, it seems, the answer is “maybe.” In Africa, for example, efforts are underway to increase the use of jatropha – an inedible, drought-resistant shrub – as a biofuel feedstock. But Naylor said that low yields and high labor costs are likely to severely limit the economic returns from jatropha-based biofuels.

And in marginal growing conditions, the use of more conventional feedstocks is often restricted by resource availability. In India, for example, where almost all sugarcane is grown under irrigated conditions, expansion of sugarcane area to supply the ethanol market could lead to water shortages. Even if these countries can make large-scale biofuel production economically viable, the benefits to poor farmers could vary widely depending on the structure of the market.

“The implications of biofuel development are going to be quite different,” Naylor said, “depending on the organization of the value chain.”

Dr. Siwa Msangi, a Senior Research Fellow with the International Food Policy Research Institute, agreed. In comments following Naylor’s presentation, Msangi said biofuel development contributes most effectively to rural income growth “when you can have vertical integration…people all along the value chain have to be making money.”

Msangi also noted that commodity price increases, including those driven by ethanol mandates, could benefit small farmers if they are controlled and predictable. “Sharp, fast, sudden price rises – those are the ones that are bad for consumers,” he explained. But prices rises “can be positive…especially if those price rises can be gradual and sustained over time, because that gives people the opportunity to mobilize resources to make use of higher returns.” For example, small farmers at the local or national level can increase their production of crops in high demand for biofuel production.

The emerging connections between agriculture and energy markets are complex, Msangi said, but can be advantageous if handled carefully. “If there are good opportunities for agribusiness, I think there’s a case for taking them,” he said, “but also for being aware of the context and all the issues.”

This was the eighth talk in FSE’s Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series. 

Stanford opened a research and education center at China’s Peking University, strengthening an already close academic bond and building a stronger tie to one of the world’s fastest-growing countries.

“Globalization is the defining characteristic of the 21^st Century,” Stanford President John Hennessy said during an opening ceremony on March 21 that drew hundreds of academics, donors and government officials to the opening of the Stanford Center at Peking University.

“It is increasingly important for our students to understand what it means to be citizens of the world, to bring a more international perspective, to be able to communicate with others from different backgrounds or with different expertise,” he said. “Both Peking University and Stanford are stepping up to that challenge and moving to become more global institutions to address the challenges of this century. This new center exemplifies that.”

Designed as a resource for the entire Stanford community and administered by the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, 10 programs and departments – including the School of Medicine’s Asian Liver Center, the Bing Overseas Studies Program and the Rural Education Action Project – will locate operations at SCPKU.

FSI faculty already doing research in China showcased their work during conferences held in conjunction with the opening of the center.

The new building is available to the several hundred Stanford scholars studying, researching and conducting university activities in China each year. It also offers the opportunity for Stanford faculty to work with academics from Peking University and other universities throughout China.

“Stanford is one of the most valued partners of Peking University,” PKU President Zhou Qifeng said. “The center will create more opportunities through collaborative research, student and faculty exchange programs, joint teaching and other activities.”

The center makes Stanford the first American university to construct a building for its use on a major Chinese university campus. SCPKU will allow current educational programs to expand, but will not grant Stanford degrees.

The center’s distinctiveness is reflected in the building that houses it – a 36,000-square-foot structure that combines Chinese and Western architecture. The courtyard building was constructed with interlocking mortise-and-tenon joinery – a classic Chinese technique that eliminates the need for nails or glue.

Hand-painted scenes depicting typical Chinese landscapes and views from Stanford’s campus are featured on the building beams. At the point where beams and columns meet, artists added Chinese symbols for teaching, learning and scholarship.

State-of-the-art classrooms, conference rooms and meeting spaces fill out the two floors below the courtyard. Skylights, interior gardens and a reflecting pool invoke a natural setting.

The melding of styles brings as much substance as symbolism.

SCPKU “marks a new era of collaboration between two outstanding universities,” Gary Locke, the U.S. ambassador to China, said during the opening ceremony. “It also represents a new bridge of understanding between our nations – and most importantly – our peoples.

“There are virtually no problems in the world today that cannot be solved if the people – the scientists and engineers, and the business people – of the United States and China join together,” Locke said. “And this center will help make that happen.”

Stanford’s relationship with China dates to the late 1970s, when the university began accepting Chinese graduate students. Students from China have accounted for the largest number of Stanford’s foreign graduate students for the past decade, with about 600 enrolled last year.

Those scholars are part of the 160,000 Chinese students studying in American colleges and universities every year, a number that eclipses the 16,000 American students taking classes in China, Locke said.

“We have to know much more about each other’s cultures, customs, traditions, values and languages so we can build a mutual trust and understanding that will allow us to face all of the challenges we face,” he said. “The way to build that trust starts with building people-to-people interactions. It starts with more student exchanges…and it most certainly starts with the Stanford center here at Peking University.”

Over the last 30 years, Stanford’s bond with Peking University has grown from an initial collaboration between the schools’ Asian language departments to a wide range of joint research and academic exchanges.

In 2004, Stanford’s undergraduate study abroad and internship programs began at Peking University. The study abroad program continues to be managed by the Bing Overseas Studies Program, which hosts roughly 60 undergraduates every year on the Peking University campus.  The internship programs are coordinated by the International, Comparative, and Area Studies Program.

The overseas studies program offers a broad curriculum taught by a Stanford faculty-in-residence who spends a 10-week quarter with the students in Beijing.  A range of topical and language courses are taught by Peking University faculty.

“The new center at PKU allows us to continue this dynamic program in a new environment designed to encourage interaction across disciplines and with graduate students and faculty from both universities,” said Irene Kennedy, the program’s executive director. “We also plan to continue supporting and developing interactions between Stanford and PKU students through language partnering and by including Chinese students in classes taught by Stanford faculty and associated field trips.”

Jean Oi and Andrew Walder – both senior fellows at the Freeman Spogli Institute – began building on that relationship in 2006 by envisioning a way to bolster Stanford research, teaching, training and outreach activities in China. Their ideas led to the creation of SCPKU and several new academic programs, including a law school exchange program.

The $7 million project is funded entirely from gifts made to the Stanford International Initiative. The lead donor was the charitable foundation of the family of Chien Lee, a Hong Kong-based private investor and Stanford emeritus trustee who received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the university in 1975 and his MBA from the Graduate School of Business four years later.

The SCPKU building is named for his father, the late Lee Jung Sen, who attended Peking University in the mid-1930s when it was Yenching University. Lee’s mother, Leatrice Lowe Lee, graduated from Stanford in 1945.

A bust of Lee Jung Sen sits in SCPKU’s courtyard, one level above the modern facility and surrounded by the more familiar, traditional Chinese architecture.

The demand for food, feed and fuel will continue to rise as the world population grows and becomes more affluent. Meeting this demand will be especially challenging because of global warming, say climate experts, and the impacts of climate variability could make food markets even more volatile, adds Rosamond L. Naylor, professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford University.

Naylor led a symposium on the compound effects of climate change and climate variability on food security at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) February 17th.

The symposium focused on two examples of climate variability: changes in growing-season temperature extremes beyond the range observed in the historical record, and changes in the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon – the most energetic form of year-to-year climate variability known.

Panelist David S. Battisti, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, addressed key challenges in assessing the impact of extreme temperatures in coming decades. According to Battisti, global warming models forcast that temperature variability will increase as the average temperature warms, greatly compounding the likelihood of extreme heat and droughts. Unfortunately, these models typically have too much temperature variability in their simulations of present-day climate, he said. Battisti's talk focused on the cause of these modeling biases and their impact on climate forecasting.

Panelist Daniel J. Vimont, associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, discussed the impacts of El Niño in a warmer world. ENSO impacts can be severe in regions in and surrounding the tropical Pacific, and can extend around the globe, he said. ENSO variability – its return period and intensity – are very sensitive to changes in mean conditions in the tropical Pacific, he added, but these conditions are notoriously difficult to simulate using the present generation of global climate models. Vimont presented results from the linear ocean atmosphere model (LOAM), a new scientific tool for estimating global warming's impact on ENSO variability.

Naylor addressed the impacts of climate on global markets for major staple commodities, which are already under pressure from increased population-, income-, and energy-driven demands. She outlined the potential effects of climate variability on regional trade patterns, price volatility, policy responses and human welfare. 

 

Mark Shwartz is the Communications/Writer at Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University.

In Kenya, 11 million people suffer from malnourishment. Twenty percent of children younger than five are underweight, and nearly one in three are below normal height. In a typical day, the average Kenyan consumes barely half as many calories as the average American.

But Kenya – and other underfed countries throughout Sub-Saharan Africa – have more than enough land to grow the food needed for their hungry populations.

The juxtaposition of food deprivation and land abundance boils down to a failure of national agriculture policies, says Thom Jayne, professor of international development at Michigan State University. Governments haven’t helped small farmers acquire rights to uncultivated land or use the land they own more productively, he said.

Speaking earlier this month at a symposium organized by the Center on Food Security and the Environment, Jayne said lifting African farmers out of poverty will require a new development approach.

The focus, he said, should be on increasing smallholder output and putting idle land to work in the hands of the rural poor.

Much of Sub-Saharan Africa’s fertile land, Jayne explained, falls under the ownership of state governments or wealthy investors who leave large tracts of land unplanted.

Meanwhile, population density in many rural areas exceeds the estimated carrying capacity for rainfed agriculture – approximately 500 persons per square kilometer, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Above this density threshold, farm sizes become so small, farming becomes economically unsustainable.

“As farm size shrinks, it’s increasingly difficult to produce a surplus,” Jayne said. “As it’s difficult to produce a surplus, it becomes difficult to finance investments in fertilizer and other inputs that could help you intensify.”

Agricultural development policies, Jayne said, have exacerbated these problems. One Zambian fertilizer subsidy program, for example, delivered support payments to over 50 percent of farms greater than five hectares in size – but only reached 14 percent of farmers whose holdings measured one hectare or smaller.

“This was a poverty reduction program that was targeted to large farms,” Jayne said. “Where’re the allocations to R&D appropriate to one hectare farms, tsetse fly control, vet services, all the things that are going to make that one hectare farm more productive?”

He stressed that investments in small farms could reduce poverty.

“Fifty to seventy percent of the population in these countries is engaged in agriculture,” he said. “There aren’t very many levers to reduce poverty and get growth processes going except to focus on the activities that that fifty to seventy percent are primarily engaged in.”

Smallholder-based growth strategies delivered stunning results in Green Revolution-era India – while large-farm strategies in Latin American countries have largely failed to alleviate rural poverty, he said.

Symposium commentator Byerlee, a rural policy expert and former lead economist for the World Bank, agreed with Jayne. In particular, Byerlee expressed skepticism about the benefit of large land investments by foreign agricultural interests.

“The social impacts aren’t going to be very much,” he said of the large-scale mechanized farming operations favored by foreign investors.

“They don’t create many jobs,” he said. “That’s really what we should be focusing on in terms of poverty reduction – job creation.”

Byerlee also stressed the need to formalize Sub-Saharan Africa’s land tenure systems. Currently, he said, about eighty percent of Africa’s land is titled informally under “customary” rights.

“When you have this population pressure, and on top of that you have commercial pressures coming in from investors, this system is just not going to stand up,” he said. “If you had better functioning land markets, it could reduce the transaction costs for investors, allow smallholders to access land, and provide an exit strategy for people at the bottom end.”

Jayne suggested reforms and new policies should include mechanisms to help small farmers gain access to unused fertile land. He called for comprehensive audits of land resources in Sub-Saharan African nations, a tax on uncultivated arable acreage, and a transparent public auction to distribute idle state lands to small farmers.

Additionally, he said, governments can help by improving infrastructure in remote rural areas and clearing fertile land of pests – such as tsetse flies – that threaten crops and human health.

But whatever particular policies they choose to pursue, Jayne said, African governments cannot afford to ignore the problems associated with inequitable land distribution and low smallholder agricultural productivity and. Failure to implement broad-based, smallholder-focused growth strategies will result in “major missed opportunities to reduce poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa,” he said.

This was the seventh talk in FSE's Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series.