The Center on Food Security and the Environment is a joint effort of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
FSI scholars approach their research on the environment from regulatory, economic and societal angles. The Center on Food Security and the Environment weighs the connection between climate change and agriculture; the impact of biofuel expansion on land and food supply; how to increase crop yields without expanding agricultural lands; and the trends in aquaculture. FSE’s research spans the globe – from the potential of smallholder irrigation to reduce hunger and improve development in sub-Saharan Africa to the devastation of drought on Iowa farms. David Lobell, a senior fellow at FSI and a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, has looked at the impacts of increasing wheat and corn crops in Africa, South Asia, Mexico and the United States; and has studied the effects of extreme heat on the world’s staple crops.
Philanthropist and software giant Bill Gates spoke to a Stanford audience last week about the importance of foreign aid and product innovation in the fight against chronic hunger, poverty and disease in the developing world.
His message goes hand-in-hand with the ongoing work of researchers at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Much of that work is supported by FSI’s Global Underdevelopment Action Fund, which provides seed grants to help faculty members design research experiments and conduct fieldwork in some of the world’s poorest places.
Four FSI senior fellows – Larry Diamond, Jeremy Weinstein, Paul Wise and Walter Falcon – respond to some of the points made by Gates and share insight into their own research and ideas about how to advance and secure the most fragile nations.
Without first improving people’s health, Gates says it’s harder to build good governance and reliable infrastructure in a developing country. Is that the best way to prioritize when thinking about foreign aid?
Larry Diamond: I have immense admiration for what Bill Gates is doing to reduce childhood and maternal fatality and improve the quality of life in poor countries. He is literally saving millions of lives. But in two respects (at least), it's misguided to think that public health should come "before" improvements in governance.
First, there is no reason why we need to choose, or why the two types of interventions should be in conflict. People need vaccines against endemic and preventable diseases – and they need institutional reforms to strengthen societal resistance to corruption, a sociopolitical disease that drains society of the energy and resources to fight poverty, ignorance, and disease.
Second, good governance is a vital facilitator of improved public health. When corruption is controlled, public resources are used efficiently and justly to build modern sanitation and transportation systems, and to train and operate modern health care systems. With good, accountable governance, public health and life expectancy improve much more dramatically. When corruption is endemic, life-saving vaccines, drugs, and treatments too often fall beyond the reach of poor people who cannot make under-the-table payments.
Foreign aid has come under criticism for not being effective, and most countries have very small foreign aid budgets. How do you make the case that foreign aid is a worthy investment?
Jeremy M. Weinstein: While foreign aid may be a small part of most countries’ national budgets, global development assistance has increased markedly in the past 50 years. Between 2000 and 2010, global aid increased from $78 billion to nearly $130 billion – and the U.S. continues to be the world’s leading donor.
The challenge in the next decade will be to sustain high aid volumes given the economic challenges that now confront developed countries. I am confident that we can and will sustain these volumes for three reasons.
First, a strong core of leading voices in both parties recognizes that promoting development serves our national interest. In this interconnected world, our security and prosperity depend in important ways on the security and prosperity of those who live beyond our borders.
Second, providing assistance is a reflection of our values – it is these humanitarian motives that drove the unprecedented U.S. commitment to fighting HIV/AIDS during the Bush Administration.
Perhaps most importantly, especially in tight budget times, development agencies are learning a great deal about what works in foreign assistance, and are putting taxpayers’ dollars to better use to reduce poverty, fight disease, increase productivity, and strengthen governance – with increasing evidence to show for it.
Some of the most dire situations in the developing world are found in conflict zones. How can philanthropists and nongovernmental organizations best work in places with unstable governments and public health crises? Is there a role for larger groups like the Gates Foundation to play in war-torn areas?
Paul H. Wise: As a pediatrician, the central challenge is this: The majority of preventable child deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa and in much of the world occur in areas of political instability and poor governance.
This means that if we are to make real progress in improving child health we must be able to enhance the provision of critical, highly efficacious health interventions in areas that are characterized by complex political environments – often where corruption, civil conflict, and poor public management are the rule.
Currently, most of the major global health funders tend to avoid working in such areas, as they would rather invest their efforts and resources in supportive, well-functioning locations. This is understandable. However, given where the preventable deaths are occurring, it is not acceptable.
Our efforts are directed at creating new strategies capable of bringing essential services to unstable regions of the world. This will require new collaborations between health professionals, global security experts, political scientists, and management specialists in order to craft integrated child health strategies that respect both the technical requirements of critical health services and the political and management innovations that will ensure that these life-saving interventions reach all children in need.
Gates says innovation is essential to improving agricultural production for small farmers in the poorest places. What is the most-needed invention or idea that needs to be put into place to fight global hunger?
Walter P. Falcon: No single innovation will end hunger, but widespread use of cell phone technology could help.
Most poor agricultural communities receive few benefits from agricultural extension services, many of which were decimated during earlier periods of structural reform. But small farmers often have cell phones or live in villages where phones are present.
My priority innovation is for a $10 smart phone, to be complemented with a series of very specific applications designed for transferring knowledge about new agricultural technologies to particular regions. Using the wiki-like potential of these applications, it would also be possible for farmers from different villages to teach each other, share critical local knowledge, and also interact with crop and livestock specialists.
Language and visual qualities of the applications would be key, and literacy problems would be constraining. But the potential payoff seems enormous.
Rosamond L. Naylor, director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment, will join demographers, authors, activists, economists, and scientists for a daylong symposium on population at the Moving Mountains Symposium in Telluride May 25. During the daylong symposium speakers will touch on subjects like water tables, food security, women's education, immigration, and human longevity in the context of population growth.
Clip from Telluride Daily Planet:
FSE director Roz Naylor will address the challenges of feeding the growing world. According to Naylor, humans are already pushing against the limits of high yield agriculture, fisheries and habitat displacement for farming to feed a population that is trending toward a more carnivorous, and therefore higher impact, diet.
“Part of the focus is: How do we meet future demands of so many people on the planet? Another important question is, if we are successful, does it just promote and enable population growth?” she said, or does it set the stage for a population to level out.
Feeding the world goes back to agriculture and food production but also biofuels, and it will require new technologies and interdisciplinary collaboration, Naylor said.
Other participants include Stanford's Paul Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb” and long-time leading voice on the population issue, who will talk about what will happen when the population bomb explodes.
Connecting the Dots conference website
Stanford experts from a range of disciplines discuss the interconnections and interactions among humanity's needs for and use of water, food, energy, and environment. Drawing on their own research, the speakers illustrate and evaluate some of the ways in which decisions in one resource area can lead to trade-offs or co-benefits in others. Participants examine sustainable freshwater resources and uses in Africa, Asia, and the arid West.
Panel: Africa - Water, Nutrition, Health and Poverty
China: Water, Food, Climate, and Policy
Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center
Encina Hall East, E501
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Shinyoung is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, and joined FSE as a visiting researcher and recipient of a 2012 Fellowship for prospective researchers from the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Her dissertation focuses on agricultural transformation in Indonesia. She recently completed her field research in rural Java in 2011, dealing with challenges facing small farmers in the current process of Indonesian agricultural transformation, and their responses to these challenges. She is analyzing how Indonesian small subsistence farmers can increase labour productivity in the evolving context of the middle-income country trap and green restructuring. She is currently writing about labour transition from agriculture to non-agriculture in middle-income countries, with a focus on rural Java, and the various challenges associated with this process.
Her interests center on occupations in transition, dealing with restructured jobs, labour, and skills. She has worked as a consultant for the International Labour Organization on two projects related to green jobs; she was a coauthor of the joint ILO/EU publication, Skills for Green Jobs, and a contributing author to reports on skills and occupational needs in the green economy.
For most scholars the concept of security encompasses issues of state legitimacy, economic and political sovereignty, and protection from military, nuclear, or terrorist assault. Yet billions of people, particularly in the developing world, face more severe, individual security threats on a daily basis, such as inadequate nutrition, disease burdens, lack of potable water, and risks of sexual assault or human trafficking. Such human security concerns can become national security issues when citizens rise up against their governments or threaten to rebel. Human security issues can also emerge as international security threats—those that create conflict or galvanize cooperation among governments—with escalating income and resource inequities between countries. Stanford University has a strong tradition of scholarship in conventional areas of national and international security, as well as in the areas of global food security and health policy. On November 10, 2011, Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) held a major conference to integrate these areas of scholarship, and to launch the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) as a major thrust of its international research and teaching agenda.
Climate change has the potential to be a source of increased variability if crops are more frequently exposed to damaging weather conditions. Yield variability could respond to a shift in the frequency of extreme events to which crops are susceptible, or if weather becomes more variable. Here we focus on the United States, which produces about 40% of the world’s maize, much of it in areas that are expected to see increased interannual variability in temperature. We combine a statistical crop model based on historical climate and yield data for 1950–2005 with temperature and precipitation projections from 15 different global circulation models. Holding current growing area constant, aggregate yields are projected to decrease by an average of 18% by 2030–2050 relative to 1980–2000 while the coefficient of variation of yield increases by an average of 47%. Projections from 13 out of 15 climate models result in an aggregate increase in national yield coefficient of variation, indicating that maize yields are likely to become more volatile in this key growing region without effective adaptation responses. Rising CO2 could partially dampen this increase in variability through improved water use efficiency in dry years, but we expect any interactions between CO2 and temperature or precipitation to have little effect on mean yield changes.
Binswanger-Mkhize's talk will look at past and likely future agricultural growth and rural poverty reduction in the context of the overall economy of India, in which growth has accelerated sharply since the 1980s, but agriculture still has not followed suit. Despite slow growth, urban-rural consumption, income and poverty differentials have not risen. This is because urban-rural spillovers have led to a sharp acceleration of rural non-farm growth and income. Binswanger-Mkhize proposes an optimistic vision can be realized if agricultural growth accelerates, high and widely shared economic growth leads to strong spillovers to the rural economy, and the rural non-farm sector continues to flourish. This would enable the rural sector to keep up with income growth in the urban economy and rural poverty would rapidly decline. However, if agricultural growth fails to accelerate, and overall economic growth falters, a more pessimistic vision is also possible. Binswanger-Mkhize will also discuss the role of prices and wages in determining agricultural growth, rural poverty and nutrition, and the two interlinked income parity issues: rural-urban and agricultural-non-agricultural incomes parity.
Marianne Banziger, Deputy Director, Research & Partnership at International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) will provide commentary.
Bechtel Conference Center
