Stanford University

International Development

FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.

They are looking at novel technological interventions to improve rural livelihoods, like the development implications of solar power-generated crop growing in Northern Benin.

FSI academics also assess which political processes yield better access to public services, particularly in developing countries. With a focus on health care, researchers have studied the political incentives to embrace UNICEF’s child survival efforts and how a well-run anti-alcohol policy in Russia affected mortality rates.

FSI’s work on international development also includes training the next generation of leaders through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.

Woods Institute Food Security Salon

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Food security links health, development, national security and the environment in unique and important ways. This Food Security Salon focused on presenting research solutions to global issues of food security, hunger, and environmental degradation from agricultural practices. Stanford faculty discussed their work on how global food supplies and human health are affected by climate change, agricultural intensification and world markets.

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
0
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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David Lobell

Energy and Environment Building
473 Via Ortega
Stanford CA 94305

(650) 721-6207
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Professor, Earth System Science
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR)
Affiliate, Precourt Institute of Energy
shg_ff1a1284.jpg PhD

David Lobell is the Benjamin M. Page Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Earth System Science and the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. He is also the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy and Research (SIEPR).

Lobell's research focuses on agriculture and food security, specifically on generating and using unique datasets to study rural areas throughout the world. His early research focused on climate change risks and adaptations in cropping systems, and he served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report as lead author for the food chapter and core writing team member for the Summary for Policymakers. More recent work has developed new techniques to measure progress on sustainable development goals and study the impacts of climate-smart practices in agriculture. His work has been recognized with various awards, including the Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union (2010), a Macarthur Fellowship (2013), the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences (2022) and election to the National Academy of Sciences (2023).

Prior to his Stanford appointment, Lobell was a Lawrence Post-doctoral Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He holds a PhD in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University and a Sc.B. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University.

Lobell Lab

A project to advance the science that guides investment in food security and crop productivity, and to effectively communicate this science to a broad audience.
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G-FEED: Global Food, Environment and Economic Dynamics

An interdisciplinary group working cooperatively to understand the relationship between society and the environment by examining regional and global scale phenomena using statistical analyses of real world data.
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Walter P. Falcon

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1936-2023
Helen Farnsworth Professor of International Agricultural Policy, Economics (Emeritus)
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Walter Falcon was former deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment, former director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Farnsworth professor of International Agricultural Policy and Economics at Stanford University (Emeritus). He died on August 2, 2023. Read his obituary here.

In 1972, Falcon moved from Harvard University to Stanford University's Food Research Institute where he served as professor of economics and director until 1991. From 1991-1998, he directed the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and from 1998-2007 he co-directed the Center for Environmental Science and Policy. He also served as senior associate dean for the social sciences, a member of the academic senate, and twice a member of the University's Advisory Board.

Falcon consulted with numerous international organizations, and had been a trustee of Winrock International and chairman of the board of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the International Center for Wheat and Maize Improvement (CIMMYT). Falcon became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1991. Falcon was cited as the outstanding 1958 graduate of Iowa State University in 1989 and in 1992 he was awarded the prestigious Bintang Jasa Utama medal of merit by the government of Indonesia for twenty-five years of assistance with that country's development effort. His recent co-authored papers have analyzed the effects of El Nino on Asian agriculture; Mexican agricultural policy; food price volatility; and biofuels.

Falcon received a BS in Agricultural Economics at Iowa State University in 1958, an MA in Economics at Harvard University in 1960, and a PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 1962.

FSI Senior Fellow, Emeritus
Stanford Woods Institute Senior Fellow, Emeritus
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Untapped data from Africa predicts corn peril if temperatures rise

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David Lobell
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A team led by FSE fellow David Lobell has found a valuable, untapped resource in historical data from crop yield trials conducted across sub-Saharan Africa. Combined with weather records, they show that yield losses would occur across 65 percent of maize-growing areas from a temperature rise of a single degree Celsius, even with sufficient water. Data from yield tests in other regions of the world could help predict changes in crop yields from climate change.

A hidden trove of historical crop yield data from Africa shows that corn - long believed to tolerate hot temperatures - is a likely victim of global warming.

Stanford agricultural scientist David Lobell and researchers at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) report in the inaugural issue of Nature Climate Change next week that a clear negative effect of warming on maize - or corn - production was evident in experimental crop trial data conducted in Africa by the organization and its partners from 1999 to 2007.

Led by Lobell, the researchers combined data from 20,000 trials in sub-Saharan Africa with weather data recorded at stations scattered across the region. They found that a temperature rise of a single degree Celsius would cause yield losses for 65 percent of the present maize-growing region in Africa - provided the crops received the optimal amount of rainfall. Under drought conditions, the entire maize-growing region would suffer yield losses, with more than 75 percent of areas predicted to decline by at least 20 percent for 1 degree Celsius of warming.

"The pronounced effect of heat on maize was surprising because we assumed maize to be among the more heat-tolerant crops," said Marianne Banziger, co-author of the study and deputy director general for research at CIMMYT."

"Essentially, the longer a maize crop is exposed to temperatures above 30 C, or 86 F, the more the yield declines," she said. "The effect is even larger if drought and heat come together, which is expected to happen more frequently with climate change in Africa, Asia or Central America, and will pose an added challenge to meeting the increasing demand for staple crops on our planet."

Similar sources of information elsewhere in the developing world could improve crop forecasting for other vast regions where data has been lacking, according to Lobell, who is lead author of the paper describing the study.

"Projections of climate change impacts on food production have been hampered by not knowing exactly how crops fair when it gets hot," Lobell said. "This study helps to clear that issue up, at least for one important crop."

While the crop trials have been run for many years throughout Africa, to identify promising varieties for release to farmers, nobody had previously examined the weather at the trial sites and studied the effect of weather on the yields, said Lobell, who is an assistant professor of environmental earth system science and fellow at Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment.

"These trials were organized for completely different purposes than studying the effect of climate change on the crops," he said. "They had a much shorter term goal, which was to get the overall best-performing strains into the hands of farmers growing maize under a broad range of conditions."

The data recorded at the yield testing sites did not include weather information. Instead, the researchers used data gathered from weather stations all over sub-Saharan Africa. Although the stations were operated by different organizations, all data collection was organized by the World Meteorological Organization, so the methods used were consistent.

Lobell then took the available weather data and interpolated between recording stations to infer what the weather would have been like at the test sites. By merging the weather and crop data, the researchers could examine climate impacts.

"It was like sending two friends on a blind date - we weren't sure how it would go, but they really hit it off," Lobell said.

Previously, most research on climate change impacts on agriculture has had to rely on crop data from studies in the temperate regions of North America and Europe, which has been a problem.

"When you take a model that has been developed with data from one kind of environment, such as a temperate climate, and apply it to the rest of the world, there are lots of things that can go wrong" Lobell said, noting that much of the developing world lies in tropical or subtropical climates.

But he said many of the larger countries in the developing world, such as India, China and Brazil, which encompass a wide range of climates, are running yield testing programs that could be a source of comparable data. Private agribusiness companies are also increasingly doing crop testing in the tropics.

"We're hoping that with this clear demonstration of the value of this kind of data for assessing climate impacts on crops that others will either share or take a closer look themselves at their data for various crops," Lobell said.

"I think we may just be scratching the surface of what can be achieved by combining existing knowledge and data from the climate and agriculture communities. Hopefully this will help catalyze some more effort in this area."

Lobell is a Center Fellow at the Program on Food Security and the Environment, a joint program of Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

The work was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation

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Scientists identify new implications of perennial bioenergy crops

Authors
David Lobell
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A team of researchers from Stanford University, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and Arizona State University has found that converting large swaths of land to bioenergy crops could have a wide range of effects on regional climate.

In an effort to help wean itself off fossil fuels, the U.S. has mandated significant increases in renewable fuels, with more than one-third of the domestic corn harvest to be used for conversion to ethanol by 2018. But concerns about effects of corn ethanol on food prices and deforestation had led to research suggesting that ethanol be derived from perennial crops, like the giant grasses Miscanthus and switchgrass. Nearly all of this research, though, has focused on the effects of ethanol on carbon dioxide emissions, which drive global warming.

"Almost all of the work performed to date has focused on the carbon effects," said Matei Georgescu, a climate modeler working in ASU's Center for Environmental Fluid Dynamics. "We've tried to expand our perspective to look at a more complete picture.  What we've shown is that it's not all about greenhouse gases, and that modifying the landscape can be just as important."

Georgescu and his colleagues report their findings in the current issue (Feb. 28, 2011) of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (see Direct Climate Effects of Perennial Bioenergy Crops in the United States). Co-authors are David Lobell of Stanford University's Program on Food Security and the Environment and Christopher B. Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science, also located in Stanford, California.

In their study, the researchers simulated an entire growing season with a state-of-the-art regional climate model. They ran two sets of experiments - one with an annual crop representation over the central U.S. and one with an extended growing season to represent perennial grasses. In the model, the perennial plants pumped more water from the soil to the atmosphere, leading to large local cooling. 

"We've shown that planting perennial bioenergy crops can lower surface temperatures by about a degree Celsius locally, averaged over the entire growing season. That's a pretty big effect, enough to dominate any effects of carbon savings on the regional climate." said Lobell.

The primary physical process at work is based on greater evapotranspiration (combination of evaporated water from the soil surface and plant canopy and transpired water from within the soil) for perennial crops compared to annual crops. 

"More study is needed to understand the long-term implication for regional water balance." Georgescu said. "This study focused on temperature, but the more general point is that simply assessing the impacts on carbon and greenhouse gases overlooks important features that we cannot ignore if we want a bioenergy path that is sustainable over the long haul."

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Direct Climate Effects of Perennial Bioenergy Crops in the United States

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Biomass-derived energy offers the potential to increase energy security while mitigating anthropogenic climate change, but a successful path toward increased production requires a thorough accounting of costs and benefits. Until recently, the efficacy of biomass-derived energy has focused primarily on biogeochemical consequences. Here we show that the biogeophysical effects that result from hypothetical conversion of annual to perennial bioenergy crops across the central United States impart a significant local to regional cooling with considerable implications for the reservoir of stored soil water. This cooling effect is related mainly to local increases in transpiration, but also to higher albedo. The reduction in radiative forcing from albedo alone is equivalent to a carbon emissions reduction of 78 t C ha-1 , which is six times larger than the annual biogeochemical effects that arise from offsetting fossil fuel use. Thus, in the near-term, the biogeophysical effects are an important aspect of climate impacts of biofuels, even at the global scale. Locally, the simulated cooling is sufficiently large to partially offset projected warming due to increasing greenhouse gases over the next few decades. These results demonstrate that a thorough evaluation of costs and benefits of bioenergy-related land-use change must include potential impacts on the surface energy and water balance to comprehensively address important concerns for local, regional, and global climate change.

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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Authors
Matei Georgescu
David Lobell
Christopher B. Field
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Connecting the Dots: The Food, Energy, Water, and Climate Nexus

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Conference presentations and tutorials now available

Conference website

Stanford experts from a range of disciplines discuss the interconnections and interactions among humanity's needs for and use of food, energy, water, and environment. Drawing on their own research, the speakers will illustrate and evaluate some of the ways in which decisions in one resource area can lead to trade-offs or co-benefits in others. Symposium attendees participate in breakout sessions, led by Stanford students and faculty, on a range of challenges associated with sustainable food systems.

Stanford faculty participants include: Stacey Bent (Center on Nanostructuring for Efflicient Energy Conversion) Welcome; Roz Naylor (Program on Food Security and the Environment, Woods Institute for the Environment) The Global Food Challenge; Chris Field (Carnegie Institution Department of Global Ecology) The Food-Energy Nexus; David Lobell (Program on Food Security and the Environment, Woods Institute for the Environment) The Food-Climate Nexus; Buzz Thompson (Woods Institute for the Environment) The Food-Water Nexus; Mariano-Florentino Cuellar (Center for International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies) The Food-Security Nexus; and Pamela Matson (School of Earth Sciences) The Way Forward. Breakout session topics include how to lower the carbon footprint of food, aquaculture, and how to make meat more sustainable.

Bishop Auditorium
518 Memorial Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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
0
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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Christopher B. Field

Jerry Yang & Akiko Yamazaki Environment & Energy Bldg.
473 Via Ortega, Room 221
Stanford, CA 94305
Phone: 650.736.4352

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Perry L. McCarty Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.; Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences; FSI Senior Fellow, by courtesy
chris_field.png PhD

Chris Field is the Perry L. McCarty Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

His research focuses on climate change, ranging from work on improving climate models, to prospects for renewable energy systems, to community organizations that can minimize the risk of a tragedy of the commons.

Field has been deeply involved with national and international scale efforts to advance science and assessment related to global ecology and climate change. He served as co-chair of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from 2008-2015, where he led the effort on the IPCC Special Report on “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation” (2012) and the Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (2014) on Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability.

Field assumed leadership of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment in September 2016. His other appointments at Stanford University include serving as the Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences; Professor of Earth System Science in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences; and Senior Fellow with the Precourt Institute for Energy. Prior to his appointment as Woods' Perry L. McCarty Director, Field served as director of the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global Ecology, which he founded in 2002. Field's tenure at the Carnegie Institution dates back to 1984.

His widely cited work has earned many recognitions, including election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Max Planck Research Award, the American Geophysical Union’s Roger Revelle Medal and the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Science Communication. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Ecological Society of America.

Field holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from Harvard College and earned his Ph.D. in biology from Stanford in 1981.

Christopher Field Speaker

David Lobell

Energy and Environment Building
473 Via Ortega
Stanford CA 94305

(650) 721-6207
0
Professor, Earth System Science
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR)
Affiliate, Precourt Institute of Energy
shg_ff1a1284.jpg PhD

David Lobell is the Benjamin M. Page Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Earth System Science and the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. He is also the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy and Research (SIEPR).

Lobell's research focuses on agriculture and food security, specifically on generating and using unique datasets to study rural areas throughout the world. His early research focused on climate change risks and adaptations in cropping systems, and he served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report as lead author for the food chapter and core writing team member for the Summary for Policymakers. More recent work has developed new techniques to measure progress on sustainable development goals and study the impacts of climate-smart practices in agriculture. His work has been recognized with various awards, including the Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union (2010), a Macarthur Fellowship (2013), the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences (2022) and election to the National Academy of Sciences (2023).

Prior to his Stanford appointment, Lobell was a Lawrence Post-doctoral Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He holds a PhD in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University and a Sc.B. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University.

Lobell Lab

A project to advance the science that guides investment in food security and crop productivity, and to effectively communicate this science to a broad audience.
More Information

G-FEED: Global Food, Environment and Economic Dynamics

An interdisciplinary group working cooperatively to understand the relationship between society and the environment by examining regional and global scale phenomena using statistical analyses of real world data.
More Information
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Barton H. Thompson

Jerry Yang & Akiko Yamazaki Environment & Energy Bldg.
473 Via Ortega, Rm 225
Stanford, CA 94305-4020

(650) 723-3402
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Robert E. Paradise Professor of Natural Resources Law
buzz.jpg JD

A leading expert in environmental and natural resources law and policy, Barton H. “Buzz” Thompson, Jr., JD/MBA ’76 (BA ’72), has contributed a large body of scholarship on environmental issues ranging from the future of endangered species and fisheries to the use of economic techniques for regulating the environment. He is the founding director of the law school’s Environmental and Natural Resources Program, Perry L. McCarty Director and senior fellow of the Woods Institute for the Environment, and a senior fellow (by courtesy) at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. In 2008, the Supreme Court appointed Professor Thompson to serve as the special master in Montana v. Wyoming (137 Original). Professor Thompson is chairman of the board of the Resources Legacy Fund and the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation, a California trustee for The Nature Conservancy, and a board member of both the American Farmland Trust and the Sonoran Institute. He previously served as a member of the Science Advisory Board for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1986, he was a partner at O’Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles and a lecturer at the UCLA School of Law. He was a law clerk to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist ’52 (BA ’48, MA ’48) of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Joseph T. Sneed of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and (by courtesy) the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Barton H. Thompson Speaker
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar Speaker
Pamela A. Matson Dean of the School of Earth Sciences, Goldman Professor of Geological and Environmental Sciences and FSI Senior Fellow Speaker Stanford University
Conferences

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

Managing Food Price Volatility: Approaches at the Global, National and Household Levels

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What does price instability have to do with food security? Price spikes hurt poor consumers, price collapses hurt farmers, and price risks reduce investment. Timmer's work suggests that food price instability also has a deeper and more insidious impact: it slows down economic growth and the structural transformation that is the pathway out of rural poverty. Food price instability really hurts the poor in both the short run and the long run.

"Food security is not a viable social objective unless it is also a profitable undertaking for input suppliers, farmers, and marketers of output. Consumers must then be able to afford to purchase this food, secure in the knowledge that it is safe and nutritious. Achieving food security within these constraints of a complex economic system is a challenge because both poor consumers and small farmers must be effective participants."                                     -- Peter Timmer

Thom Jayne, Professor of International Development at Michigan State University, will join the conversation as a discussant following the main presentation. 

Biography

C. Peter Timmer 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. He is an advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on agricultural development issues.

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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
2720_image_PeterTimmerpg.jpg

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 Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Development Studies, Emeritus, at Harvard University Speaker
Thom Jayne Professor of International Development Commentator Michigan State University
Symposiums
Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series

The Stanford Food Summit

An unprecedented gathering of Stanford experts on food-related issues from across all of the University’s seven schools provided a catalyst for generating solutions to some of the nation’s and the planet’s most challenging and important crises, including: the national health crisis, the climate crisis, outdated national food policies, the hidden toll of industrial food production and much more.

FSE Center Fellow David Lobell presented on Global Food Security. His presentation, along with the rest of the conference participants can be access here.

Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center

David Lobell

Energy and Environment Building
473 Via Ortega
Stanford CA 94305

(650) 721-6207
0
Professor, Earth System Science
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR)
Affiliate, Precourt Institute of Energy
shg_ff1a1284.jpg PhD

David Lobell is the Benjamin M. Page Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Earth System Science and the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. He is also the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy and Research (SIEPR).

Lobell's research focuses on agriculture and food security, specifically on generating and using unique datasets to study rural areas throughout the world. His early research focused on climate change risks and adaptations in cropping systems, and he served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report as lead author for the food chapter and core writing team member for the Summary for Policymakers. More recent work has developed new techniques to measure progress on sustainable development goals and study the impacts of climate-smart practices in agriculture. His work has been recognized with various awards, including the Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union (2010), a Macarthur Fellowship (2013), the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences (2022) and election to the National Academy of Sciences (2023).

Prior to his Stanford appointment, Lobell was a Lawrence Post-doctoral Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He holds a PhD in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University and a Sc.B. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University.

Lobell Lab

A project to advance the science that guides investment in food security and crop productivity, and to effectively communicate this science to a broad audience.
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G-FEED: Global Food, Environment and Economic Dynamics

An interdisciplinary group working cooperatively to understand the relationship between society and the environment by examining regional and global scale phenomena using statistical analyses of real world data.
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