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.
Food policy will be of paramount concern to economic development efforts for at least the next two decades. Governments are trying to confront their food problems, and they need good analysis and good analysts to do so. This book attempts to show that food problems are immersed in the broader problems of economic development and that solving food problems is a complex task involving a long-run vision of how food systems evolve under alternative policy environments. Our goal is to establish for the reader a sense of that vision.