Stanford University

International Relations

FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.

FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.

Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.

Deadly Investments: Large-scale Land Acquisitions in the Global South

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FSE is co-sponsoring a special event headed by the ASSU Food Cabinet at Stanford University. All questions about the event should be directed to Isabella Akker (aiakker@stanford.edu). 

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U.S. ethanol policy major contributor to global food price volatility

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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.

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

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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.

Relative to other regions of the world, most African economies are still heavily reliant on agriculture as a source of income and employment. And with more than 70 percent of the continent’s poor residing in rural areas, the production and productivity performance of African agriculture is pivotal to overall economic growth and the well-being of the poorest people in the region. After a dismal decade of output growth in the 1970s, the rate of aggregate agricultural output growth picked up for each of the subsequent three decades, and averaged 2.83 percent per year during the 2000s. With population growing at still record rates by world standards, per capita output grew much more slowly, just 0.36 percent per year during the past decade. 

The productivity evidence is mixed and difficult to summarize. The rate of African crop yield growth (at least for the four crops given closer attention in this paper: corn, wheat, rice and soybean) is generally slower than elsewhere in the world, and in keeping with patterns seen elsewhere there has been a slowdown in the pace of average crop yield growth in Africa since around 1990. African land and labor productivity levels also generally lag those found elsewhere in the world, although aggregate land productivity in Africa outperformed that of Australia and New Zealand, another region of the world with challenging agricultural soils and heavy reliance on erratic (and often agriculturally marginal) weather. The reported rates of growth in multi-factor productivity (MFP) for African agriculture are also low by world standards, but the body of available evidence suggests that African MFP growth rates picked up in recent years. Unfortunately, the lack of reliable data and differences in the analytical details between the available studies makes it hard to reconcile the evidence and reach robust conclusions about MFP performance throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

Productivity levels and growth rates are affected by a host of factors, not least the technologies linking inputs to outputs and, by implication, the amount, nature and effectiveness of the innovative effort that develops and deploys these technologies. Although overall investments in African public agricultural research and development (R&D) have increased during the past decade or so, the growth in spending is not especially widespread and dominated by growth in just a few countries. Nigeria and Ethiopia account for half the region’s increase in agricultural R&D spending from 2000-2005—the latest year for which data are presently available. The intensity of public investment (i.e., agricultural R&D spending relative to the value of agricultural output) has increased as well. However, during the 2000-2005 period Africa spent just $0.54 on public research for every $100 of agricultural output, almost half the corresponding rest-of-world intensity ($1.05) and one-fifth of the rich country average ($2.70). Fragmented and typically small research agencies, and unstable funding streams still bedevil African agricultural research endeavors and undermine efficiencies in agricultural research that are intrinsically long-term in nature. Turning around these research realties in a meaningful and sustained fashion will be critical to realizing the long-term growth in African agriculture productivity that will be required to grow that sector in particular and the region’s economies more generally.


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Oil palm development in Indonesia: Demand, trade, and land use

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.

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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Use of Climate Information in International Negotiation for Adaptation Resources

Adaptation of vulnerable areas to climate change is---and will continue to be---an important subject of negotiations taking place in several international forums, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; the Major Economies negotiations; and the G-8 talks. Ideally, adaptation assistance to any given nation would be commensurate with the social and economic impacts of future climate change and the cost of the required adaptation measures. Instead, neither is known.

Biofuels: The changing nature of agricultural demand

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Policies promoting ethanol and biodiesel production and use in the U.S., Europe, and other parts of the world since the mid-2000s have had profound—and largely unintended—consequences on global food prices, agricultural land values, land acquisition, and food security in developing countries. They have also created regional opportunities in the form of agricultural investments, crop yield growth, and booming farm economies. Rising incomes in emerging economies are generating increased demand for transportation fuels, thus stimulating further growth of the global biofuel industry. This seminar will explore the politics, economics, and global food security implications of the expanding biofuel sector. Several policy questions will be raised, including the role of biofuel mandates on food prices, the role of trade policies for stabilizing food prices in an era of increasingly tight demand, and the role of land policies and institutions for feedstock production and income distribution in the developing world.

Siwa Msangi, Senior Research Fellow in the Environment and Production Technology Division at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) will provide commentary. Msangi's work focuses on the major socio-economic and bio-physical drivers affecting agricultural production and trade, and their impacts on nutrition, poverty and the environment. Dr. Msangi manages a research portfolio that includes the economic and environmental implications of biofuels, and has coordinated the project Biofuels and the Poor in partnership with FSE.  

Biofuels videos: Roz Naylor talks food security and energy with Near Zero

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Rosamond L. Naylor

The Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki
Environment and Energy Building
Stanford University
473 Via Ortega, Office 363
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-5697 (650) 725-1992
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Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William Wrigley Professor of Earth System Science
Senior Fellow and Founding Director, Center on Food Security and the Environment
Roz_low_res_9_11_cropped.jpg PhD

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. 

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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.

Farmer networks key to agricultural innovation in developing countries

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New technologies can improve agricultural sustainability in developing countries, but only with the engagement of local farmers and the social and economic networks they depend on, say Stanford University researchers. Their findings are published in the May 23 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"Most people tend to think that technology information flows to farmers through a direct pipeline from scientists, but that isn't true," said lead author Ellen McCullough, a former research fellow at Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment, now at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The study was co-authored by Pamela Matson, dean of the School of Earth Sciences and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford.

To better understand how farmers decide to adopt new technologies, the researchers interviewed growers, farm credit unions and agricultural experts in the Yaqui Valley in Sonora, Mexico – the birthplace of the "green revolution" in wheat and one of Mexico's most productive breadbaskets.

Matson and other Stanford researchers have been working in the Yaqui Valley for nearly 20 years. Among their objectives is demonstrating how science can inform agricultural policy in an area grappling with the kinds of environmental challenges that plague other intensive farming regions.

While Yaqui Valley supplies most of Mexico's wheat, the environmental costs are high, according to the Stanford researchers. Valley farms pollute local drinking water, wreck coastal ecosystems and foul the air with particulates that cause a variety of diseases.

"If scientists want to offer solutions to manage these environmental impacts, they need to understand what influences farmers' decisions about technology and production strategies," McCullough said.

Growers in Mexico's Yaqui Valley are more likely to adopt sustainable farming technologies that have been endorsed by local credit unions.

Credit union clout

In Yaqui Valley, credit unions hold sway among the majority of farmers, McCullough said. In addition to providing loans, crop insurance, fertilizer and seed, credit unions have taken over the government's role in providing technical expertise and management advice.

Valley growers also have a long history of working with the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, a world-renowned agricultural research center known by its Spanish acronym, CIMMYT.

But interviews conducted for the PNAS study revealed that most farmers take their cues from local credit unions and not from experts at CIMMYT. As an example, McCullough pointed to a collaborative effort between CIMMYT scientists and farmers to develop a nitrogen diagnostic tool that reduces fertilizer use without sacrificing crop yields.

The device, which gives real-time readings of nitrogen levels in the soil, proved early on that it could save farmers 12 to 17 percent of their profits. Yet most farmers rejected the new technology until CIMMYT researchers finally convinced credit union officials that it was a worthwhile investment.

"The most successful innovations that have been adopted by farmers in the Yaqui Valley have come from collaborations among researchers, farmers and local establishments, like the credit unions," McCullough said. Because of their considerable influence among farmers, credit unions should be included in any effort to effect environmental change in the region, she added.

"The Yaqui case negates the simplistic view of the one-way flow of scientific information from the agricultural research community to the user community," Matson said. "If researchers seek to produce relevant knowledge that ultimately influences decision making, they must recognize the dynamics of the local knowledge system and participate purposefully and strategically in it."

The research was supported with grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

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