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.
A doubling in global food demand projected for the next 50 years poses huge challenges for the sustainability both of food production and of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and the services they provide to society. Agriculturalists are the principal managers of global useable lands and will shape, perhaps irreversibly, the surface of the Earth in the coming decades. New incentives and policies for ensuring the sustainability of agriculture and ecosystem services will be crucial if we are to meet the demands of improving yields without compromising environmental integrity or public health.
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Peter Vitousek has been on the faculty at Stanford University since 1984. His research interests include: evaluating the global cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, and how they are altered by human activity; understanding how the interaction of land and culture contributed to the sustainability of Hawaiian agriculture and society before European contact; and working to make fertilizer applications more efficient and less environmentally damaging (especially in rapidly growing economies). He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded the 2010 Japan Prize. He is director of the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources and co-director of the First Nations Futures Institute.
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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.
Kosrae, Federated States of Micronesia, is a prototype of an island economy prone to economic crowding. Average family size is large, the habitable land area is small, economic activity is limited, and household dependence on natural resources for fuel and food is high. We analyze how economic crowding - and its mitigation through trade and migration policies - affects mangrove resource use. A comparison of household survey data from 1996 and 2000 indicates that despite decreases in US aid and public-sector jobs, average household consumption of mangrove resources has not increased. Migration and remittances have allowed the purchase of imported fuel and building materials substituting for mangrove wood. Despite changing preferences and shifts toward import consumption, population growth and further declines in US financial support will likely cause aggregate demand for mangrove and upland wood to rise. Moreover, continued emigration may accelerate the export of mangrove crabs to off-island Kosraeans.
A survey of China's plant biotechnologies shows that China is developing the largest plant biotechnology capacity outside of North America. The list of genetically modified plant technologies in trials, including rice, wheat, potatoes, and peanuts, is impressive and differs from those being worked on in other countries. Poor farmers in China are cultivating more area of genetically modified plants than are small farmers in any other developing country. A survey of agricultural producers in China demonstrates that Bacillus thuringiensis cotton adoption increases production efficiency and improves farmer health.
Despite the strong signal of El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events on climate in the Indo-Pacific region, models linking ENSO-based climate variability to seasonal rice production and food security in the region have not been well developed or widely used in a policy context. This study successfully measures the connections among sea surface temperature anamolies (SSTAs), rainfall, and rice production in Indonesia during the past three decades. Regression results show particularly strong connections on Java, where 55% of the country's rice is grown. Two-thirds of the interannual variance in rice plantings and 40% of the interannual variance in rice production during the main (wet) season on Java are explained by year-to-year fluctuations in SSTAs measured 4 and 8 months in advance, respectively. These effects are cumulative; during strong El Nino years, production shortfalls in the wet season are not made up later in the crop year. The analysis demonstrates that quantitative predictions of ENSO's effects on rice harvests can provide an additional tool for managing food security in one of the world's most populous and important rice-producing countries.
Nitrate leaching from agricultural soils can represent a substantial loss of fertilizer nitrogen (N), but a large variation in losses has been reported. We report N leaching losses under four N fertilizer treatments and two farmer's fields in the Yaqui Valley, Mexico. In these irrigated wheat systems, farmers typically apply 250 kg N as anhydrous ammonia (knifed in) or urea (broadcast), with 75% applied directly before planting and 25% at the time of the first post-planting irrigation. Over two wheat seasons, we compared typical farmer's practices to alternatives that applied less N and more closely timed fertilizer application to plant demand. Field lysimeter measurements and predictions from a water transport simulation model (called NLOSS) were used to determine the amount of N leached over the season. Approximately 5 and 2% of the applied N leached below the root zone with the typical farmer's practice in 1995-96 and 1997-98, respectively. The alternative treatments reduced N leaching losses by 60 to 95% while producing comparable economic returns to the farmers. Leaching losses from the two farmer's fields were substantially higher (about 14 and 26% of the applied N). Our results indicate that the typical farmer's practice leads to relatively high N leaching losses, and that alternative practices synchronizing fertilizer application with crop demand can substantially reduce these losses.
Global aquaculture production is growing rapidly, with production more than doubling in weight and by value from 1989 to 1998. With many capture fisheries catches peaking, scientists, governments, and international organizations all point to aquaculture as the most important means to increase global fish supplies.
The aquaculture industry in the United States, which is dominated by freshwater catfish (Ictalurus punctatus) production, generates about one billion dollars each year. Marine aquaculture comprises roughly one-third of U.S. production by weight, and despite rapid increases in salmon and clam production, growth of U.S. marine aquaculture has been slow on average. Efforts to develop marine aquaculture in the open ocean could catalyze future growth.
Aquaculture has a number of economic and other benefits. But if it is done without adequate environmental safeguards it can cause environmental degredation. The main environmental effects of marine aquaculture can be divided into the following five categories:
1) Biological Pollution: Fish that escape from aquaculture facilities may harm wild fish populations through competition and interbreeding, or by spreading diseases and parasites. Escaped farmed Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) are a particular problem, and may threaten endangered wild Atlantic salmon in Maine. In the future, farming transgenic, or genetically modified, fish may exacerbate concerns about biological pollution.
2) Fish for Fish Feeds: Some types of aquaculture use large quantities of wild-caught fish as feed ingredients, and thus indirectly affect marine ecosystems thousands of miles from fish farms.
3) Organic Pollution and Eutrophication: Some aquaculture systems contribute to nutrient loading through discharges of fish wastes and uneaten feed. Compared to the largest U.S. sources of nutrient pollution, aquaculture's contribution is small, but it can be locally significant.
4) Chemical Pollution: A variety of approved chemicals are used in aquaculture, including antibiotics and pesticides. Chemical use in U.S. aquaculture is low compared to use in terrestrial agriculture, but antibiotic resistance and harm to nontarget species are concerns.
5) Habitat Modification: Marine aquaculture spreads over 26,000 marine hectares, or roughly 100 square miles. Some facilities attract marine predators, and can harm them through accidental entanglement or intentional harassment techniques.
A number of technologies and practices are available to prevent or mitigate these environmental problems. Options to make U.S. aquaculture environmentally sustainable include:
Feeding the World is a sizable volume that covers the nature of current foor problems; the scientific underpinnings of food production, including their environmental implications; a delineation of the various resource bases that serve agriculture; the basics of food comsumption, diets, and nutrition; the role of animal products; an assessment of postharvest losses; and an analysis of China's future capacity to feed itself.