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.

Climate volatility and poverty vulnerability in Tanzania

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Climate volatility could change in the future, with important implications for agricultural productivity. For Tanzania, where food production and prices are sensitive to climate, changes in climate volatility could have severe implications for poverty. This study uses climate model projections, statistical crop models, and general equilibrium economic simulations to determine how the vulnerability of Tanzania's population to impoverishment by climate variability could change between the late 20th Century and the early 21st Century. Under current climate volatility, there is potential for a range of possible poverty outcomes, although in the most extreme of circumstances, poverty could increase by as many as 650,000 people due to an extreme interannual decline in grain yield. However, scenarios of future climate from multiple climate models indicate no consensus on future changes in temperature or rainfall volatility, so that either an increase or decrease is plausible. Scenarios with the largest increases in climate volatility are projected to render Tanzanians increasingly vulnerable to poverty through impacts on staple grains production in agriculture, with as many as 90,000 additional people entering poverty on average. Under the scenario where precipitation volatility decreases, poverty vulnerability decreases, highlighting the possibility of climate changes that oppose the ensemble mean, leading to poverty impacts of opposite sign. The results suggest that evaluating potential changes in volatility and not just the mean climate state may be important for analyzing the poverty implications of climate change.

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Publication Type
Journal Articles
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Global Environmental Change
Authors
Thomas Hertel
David Lobell
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Towards Food Security in a Warmer World: Understanding Crop Responses to Climate

FSE Fellow David Lobell presented his work on climate impacts on crop production at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, UC Santa Barbara, CA.

Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, UC Santa Barbara, CA

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
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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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Seminars
Climate and Agriculture: Models, Impacts, and Adaptation Strategies
Prioritizing Investments in Food Security Under a Changing Climate

Emerging Land Issues in African Agriculture: Toward the identification of appropriate rural development strategies

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Thom Jayne, Professor of International Development from Michigan State University will answer the following questions: What are the trends in land access? How can smallholder farmers get higher value out of scarce land and how does that relate to food and non-food markets? Smallholder vs. large enterprises in Africa. Derek Byerlee, independent scholar and director of the 2009 World Development Report will provide additional commentary.

Thomas Jayne's professional career has been devoted to promoting effective policy responses to poverty and hunger in Africa. Jayne is Professor, International Development, in the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics and a member of the Core Faculty of the African Studies Center at Michigan State University. He is involved in research, outreach, and capacity building programs in collaboration with African universities and government agencies, mainly focusing on food marketing and trade policies and their effects on sustainable and equitable development. Jayne's secondary research focus has been on measuring the current and long-term effects of HIV/AIDS on African agriculture. Jayne sits on the editorial boards of two development journals, received a top paper award in 2004 by the International Association of Agricultural Economists, co-authored a paper (with graduate student Jacob Ricker-Gilbert) awarded the T.W. Schultz Award at the 2009 International Association of Agricultural Economists Triennial Meetings, and received the 2009 Best Article Award in Agricultural Economics (with co-authors Xhying Xu, William Burke, and Jones Govereh). Jayne's work has also been recognized at the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome and the Secretariat of Global Agricultural Science Policy for the Twenty-First Century.

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Thom Jayne Professor of International Development Speaker Michigan State University
Derek Byerlee Independent Scholar and Director, World Development Report, 2009 Commentator
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Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series

Climate Central interviews David Lobell on climate change and global food production

Authors
David Lobell
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Q&As
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With 2011 already off to such a wet start in many parts of the world, concerns of what flooding will do to food prices and availability in the coming months are starting to creep into the news. In Sri Lanka, flooding has devastated rice crops, and in North Dakota, heavy rain and snow is already threatening the spring wheat crop. And all this after last summer's Russian drought and heat wave helped drive global wheat prices higher.

But while farmers have always had to contend with the vagaries of the weather, a question of increasing importance is how agriculture will be affected by the climate changes projected to occur over the next century. Many scientists are studying which regions of the world may be impacted the most by increasing temperatures and changing precipitation regimes, and what is bound to happen to the supplies of the world's biggest cash crops, like wheat, corn, rice and soybeans.

A new report, The Food Gap, was released last week from the Universal Ecological Fund, and it has muddied the waters even further. The report reviews how global climate change will affect the fate of crop yields and food prices in 2020. Unfortunately, the report actually misinterpreted the connection between atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) and expected global temperature increases - despite the fact that recent reports from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Academy of Sciences clearly identify the most current peer-reviewed understanding of this. The food study suggests that within 9 years, average global temperatures will be an average of 2.4°C warmer than during preindustrial times - or almost 1.5°C warmer than it was just last year.

This exceptionally high temperature projection is completely baseless, as NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt explained on the RealClimate blog - it's more likely that the planet will experience this kind of temperature change over 100 years, not merely one decade. Nevertheless, a number of news outlets published stories on the report's projections of how this dramatic climate change could impact the global food supply by 2020. Some publications posted corrections to their own stories, but I thought it would be helpful to take a step back and examine climate change and food security in 2020 and beyond. I spoke with Stanford University's David Lobell, who studies how climate change affects crop yields and food prices. He helped clarify what the current research says about climate change and food security.

Read the full interview here.

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Expanding the boundaries of agricultural development

FSE director Rosamond Naylor was the keynote speaker at Winrock International's 25th Anniversary celebration.

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Winrock International

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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Assisting the Escape from Persistent Ultra-Poverty in Rural Africa

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Christopher Barrett reviews the evidence on persistent poverty with a focus on rural Africa. He emphasizes the importance of asset accumulation, productivity growth, risk management and the sociopolitical institutions that govern economic activity. Barrett's talk synthesizes lessons learned about what works, what doesn't and why, and identifies key topics in need of further investigation.

William Masters, Professor of Food Policy in the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts University, will join the conversation as a discussant following Barrett's presentation. 

Biography

Christopher Barrett is the Stephen B. & Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management and International Professor of Agriculture at Cornell University. He teaches and does research primarily in poverty and international development. His research program also has strong links to international, agricultural, environmental and micro economics as well as to applied econometrics. He is a Faculty Fellow and Associate Director, Economic Development Programs, at the new Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future. The Center is a major Cornell initiative aimed at promoting cutting-edge research on sustainable development in collaboration with key external partners to achieve significant real-world impact. He is also the Director of Cornell's Food Systems and Poverty Reduction IGERT program.

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Christopher Barrett Stephen B. & Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management, International Professor of Agriculture Speaker Cornell University
William Masters Professor of Food Policy Commentator Friedman School of Nutrition, Tufts
Symposiums
Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series

Why Has Africa Been Slow in Developing its Agriculture?

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Ousmane Badiane, Director for Africa at IFPRI, will talk about the investment and policy strategies needed for a dynamic agricultural sector, and how conditions in Africa differ from those in Asia.

Peter Timmer, Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Development Studies, Emeritus, at Harvard University, will join the conversation as a discussant following the main presentation.

Biography

Dr. Ousmane Badiane is the Africa Director for the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). In this role, he coordinates IFPRI's work program in the areas of food policy research, capacity strengthening, and policy communications in Africa. He is also in charge of IFPRI's partnerships with African institutions dealing with the above areas.

Dr. Badiane, a national of Senegal, was Lead Specialist for Food and Agricultural Policy for the Africa Region at the World Bank from January 1998 to August 2008. He previously worked at IFPRI as Senior Research Fellow from 1989 to 1997, when he led the institute's work on market reforms and development. While at IFPRI, he taught, as adjunct professor, at Johns Hopkins' School of Advance International Studies from 1993 to 2003. Dr. Badiane received a Masters Degree and PhD in agricultural economics from the University of Kiel in Germany.

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Ousmane Badiane Director for Africa Speaker IFPRI

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
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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 Speaker
Symposiums
Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series

Improving Food Security in the 21st Century: What are the Roles for Firms and Foundations

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Video clips (12 min)

February 10th marked the launch of FSE's new Global Food Policy and Food Security symposium series. The opening session featured Jeff Raikes (CEO, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and Greg Page (CEO, Cargill), who presented their views on global food security and the roles of the private sector and foundation community. Stanford President John Hennessy provided the opening remarks. Click herefor a news summary of the event.


Speaker biographies

Greg Page, CEO Cargill Corporation

Greg Page serves as chairman and chief executive officer of Cargill. Cargill, a leader in agribusiness, is one of the largest privately held corporations in the world, with 131,000 employees in 66 countries, and with 2010 revenues of $108 billion. He was elected chairman of the board on Sept. 11, 2007, and CEO on June 1, 2007. He continues to hold the office of president, a position to which he was elected in June 2000. He was elected to the Cargill Board of Directors in August 2000.

Page joined Cargill in 1974 as a trainee assigned to the Feed Division. Over the years, he held a number of positions in the United States and Singapore. Page worked with the start-up of a poultry processing operation in Thailand, the beef and pork processing operations of Cargill's Excel subsidiary in Wichita, Kansas, and the Financial Markets Group in Minneapolis.

Page serves as a member of Eaton Corporation's board of directors. He serves as chair of the board of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. Page received a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of North Dakota. He was born in Bottineau, N.D.

Corporate Responsibility at Cargill

Jeff Raikes, CEO Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Jeff Raikes, chief executive officer, leads the foundation's efforts to promote equity for all people around the world. He sets strategic priorities, monitors results, and facilitates relationships with key partners for all three of our program groups.

Before joining the foundation, Raikes was a member of Microsoft's senior leadership team, which sets overall strategy and direction for the company. Raikes was president of the Microsoft Business Division and oversaw the Information Worker, Server & Tools Business and Microsoft Business Solutions groups. He previously served as group vice president of the Worldwide Sales and Support Group, where he was responsible for providing strategic leadership for Microsoft's sales, marketing, and service initiatives. Before that, he served as senior vice president of Microsoft North America.

Raikes joined Microsoft in 1981 as a product manager and was instrumental in driving Microsoft's applications marketing strategy. Promoted to director of applications marketing in 1984, Raikes was the chief strategist behind the company's success in graphical applications for the Apple Macintosh and the Microsoft Windows operating system and the creation of the Microsoft Office suite of productivity applications. Before joining Microsoft, he was a software development manager at Apple Computer Inc.

Raikes, a Nebraska native, holds a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering-economic systems from Stanford University. He and his wife, Tricia, have three children. They are founders of the Raikes Foundation and are active members of the United Way of King County, where they served as co-chairs of the 2006-2007 fundraising campaign. Raikes also serves on the board of directors for Costco Wholesale Corp. and the Microsoft Alumni Foundation, where he is chair of the board.

Adding special relevance to his participation today, Raikes is an active owner of a large farming and cattle-feeding operation in Nebraska.  For the last three years, he has also been a guest lecturer in Stanford's "World Food Economy" course, and he is slated to perform in that role again tomorrow.

Gates Foundation Agricultural Development Program

Mackenzie Conference Room
Room 300, Huang Building

Greg Page CEO Speaker Cargill Corporation
Jeff Raikes CEO Speaker Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Symposiums
Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series

Food price volatility and the world's poor

Authors
Rosamond L. Naylor
Walter P. Falcon
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

An October 13 New York Times headline article warned that an increasing volatile market for grains could lead to a repeat of the 2008 food price run-up. That price spike left over 1 billion people in a state of food insecurity-a threshold symbolic in its extreme order of magnitude and in the challenges it presents for combating global hunger in the future. In a paper released December 20 in Population and Development Review FSE director Rosamond L. Naylor and deputy director Walter P. Falcon provide insight into the causes and consequences of these volatile events.

"Price variability, particularly spikes, has enormous impacts on the rural poor who spend a majority of their income on food and have minimal savings," said Naylor. "Impacts at the local level have not been well measured, yet are key to improving food security globally." 

Expectations--often faulty--have played a key role in price volatility over the past decade. Uncertain exchange rates and macro policies added to price misperceptions, as did flurries of speculative activity in organized futures markets, particularly as a result of the growing biofuels market.

"These events highlight new linkages between agriculture-energy and agriculture-finance markets that affect the world food economy today," explained Falcon. "More importantly, volatile markets compound problems of low crop productivity, increase reliance on food imports, and aggravate other internal causes of instability--conflict, weak institutions, and inadequate infrastructure--that typically plague the world's poorest countries."

To see how the rural poor were impacted on a local scale, Naylor and Falcon looked at Ghana, Uganda, Malawi, Guatemala, and India. Price changes at the local level during the 2008 price spike were frequently half that of international prices, primarily as a consequence of domestic food and trade policies.

"The price bubble was undeniably grim for poor consumers, particularly for households living under $1/day or $2/day, but not as debilitating as many commentators suggested," said Falcon. "Unfortunately, most price stabilization efforts aimed at the poor, however well intended, ended up helping larger net producers much more than those at the margin."

Additionally, domestic self-sufficiency polices tended to have long-term negative impacts on the international market when governments lacked the resources to defend a targeted price or were ‘large actors' with significant shares of global production or consumption.

For example, in the spring of 2008, the Indian government placed a ban on rice exports--a major staple in the country--when it feared significant increases in grain prices and a spread of Ug99 (wheat rust). This ban affected food prices from Asia to Africa, created mini-panics within food importing countries, and added to global grain price variability. It underscored the growing food-security and crop interdependencies among nations arising from pathogens, prices, and policies.

The extreme heat wave that hit Russia and Eastern Europe in the summer of 2010, coupled with floods in Pakistan, declining estimates of maize stocks in the U.S., and uncertainties about global GDP growth have captured the attention of many analysts and policymakers. What will happen to prices in terms of spikes, trends, and variations during 2011-2013 and beyond is uncertain.

What is known, said Naylor, is that the causes and consequences of food-price variability deserve much more attention if we are going to alleviate global food insecurity in the future.

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