A new study out of Stanford University finds extreme temperatures are cutting wheat yields by 20 to as much as 50 percent, a finding worse than previously estimated. FSE center fellow David Lobell and his colleagues used nine years of satellite measurements of wheat growth in northern India's breadbasket, the Indo-Gangetic Plains, to analyze rates of wheat ageing after exposure to temperatures higher than 34 degrees Celsius. 

Extreme heat beyond the plant's tolerance zone damages photosynthetic cells. This causes wheat to age faster, reducing the length of the growing season and the amount and size of the wheat grains. The team's crop models found that a two degree increase in temperatures would reduce the growing season by nine days, yielding 20 percent less wheat.

As the world's second-biggest crop, lost wheat yields may become a major threat to global food security. Especially given the projection that global yields need to rise 50 percent by 2050 to feed a growing, more affluent population. The results imply that warming presents an even greater challenge to wheat than previous studies estimated, and that the effectiveness of adaptations will depend on how well they reduce crop sensitivity to very hot days, particularly in areas of the world such as India already experiencing warming conditions.

Stanford University's Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) takes a global and multifaceted approach to issues of food security by tackling both the supply and demand side of the equation. By recognizing that food security issues in the 21st century are intimately tied to climate change, FSE looks at the root causes of our problems and helps to create sustainable solutions to feed those in need around the world.

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.

While many of us here in the US wake up concerned about political, economic, and military unrest at home and abroad, billions still wake up with more basic, human security concerns, opened FSE director Rosamond L. Naylor in a plenary connecting climate, energy, food, water, and health.

Are we going to have enough to eat today? How am I going to feed my family or care for family members struggling with HIV/AIDS and other infectious diesease? Is there enough water to drink, bathe, and still water my crops?

Naylor emphasized the need to bring these human security issues back into the forefront of our global conscious. While these are 'humanitarian needs at the core', they are also related to national and international security.

"When people are desperate enough, and we've seen this particularly with the food price spike in recent years, they take to the streets, and sometimes when they take to the streets they realize they are disgruntled about a number of things in addition to food prices," said Naylor.

The Arab Spring and wave of rebellions throughout the Middle East last year demonstrate the connections between food security, unmet basic needs, and national security. It has been a chaotic time for world food markets, said Naylor.

Naylor's global statistics are discouraging. Over a billion people still suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition, 1/5 don't have physical access to water, and roughly 1.6 billion are facing economic water constraints (do not have the economic resources to access available water). Food and water insecurity are exacerbating the incidence and transmission of infectious disease.

At a time when investment is sorely needed, the Hill has been making dramatic cutbacks in foreign assistance and foreign investment is falling short. Efforts made by the private sector, philanthropy, and civil society, while valuable, remain siloed. Opportunties are being missed by not addressing the interrelated nature of food and health issues.

Despite this dire outlook, Naylor offered solutions to help us rethink our development strategy.

1. Invest in more diversified and nutritious crops that have more climate adaptation potential.
2. Consider new irrigation strategies, particularly in areas like Africa where 96% of the continent is still not irrigated. Not large dams, but small, distributed irrigation systems that rely on solar and wind.
3. Integrate food and health programs and the way we think about domestic and productive water uses.

Naylor was joined on the panel by Jeff Seabright (Vice President, The Coca-Cola Company), Daniel Gerstein (Deputy Under Secretary for Science and Technology, U.S. Department of Homeland Security), and Geoff Dabelko (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars). The panel was moderated by Frank Sesno (George Washington University and Planet Forward). Video of the plenary can be found below:

On January 17, Stanford CISAC and the Woods Institute for the Environment co-sponsored a daylong conference that examined the relationship between security and the environment.

The event brought together political scientists, physicists, historians, biologists and others from across the university, and focused on how climate change might affect political stability, the role of international agreements in protecting the environment, food security and freshwater, ocean and other resource conflicts.

The goal of the event, said CISAC Co-director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, was to start a dialogue about the potential relationships between security and the environment, with the expectation that it would lead to future research projects and collaborations, and ultimately to policy recommendations.

In addition to Cuéllar, participants included Woods Co-directors Jeffrey R. Koseff and Barton H. Thompson, David Holloway, Katherine D. Marvel, Kenneth A. Schultz, David Lobell, Kaitlin Shilling, Meg Caldwell, Lynn Eden, Toshihiro Higuchi and Walter P. Falcon.

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.