Interaction

Spring 2008

The Food Research Institute

Anyone looking closely at Stanford's Food Security and the Environment program might be forgiven if they did a little double-take: Wait, isn't this the old Food Research Institute?

Walter Falcon

Not quite. The famed FRI was established in 1921. Over the decades, it was housed in various schools and built up an unparalleled reputation."There are no analogs at the present time anywhere" for the FRI, said Marshall Burke, program manager for Food Security and the Environment."Almost all the great applied agricultural economists in the world worked with FRI."

But by the 1990s, many of the FRI professors were nearing retirement, the department awarded only graduate degrees and there was general pressure at the university to streamline the number of academic units in economics.

So the FRI was a logical candidate to go, though its dismantlement was met with dismay in many circles. Walter Falcon, an economist and longtime director of both FRI and of what would become the Freeman Spogli Institute, said he tried to provide a safe haven for a number of the FRI faculty. Some moved to other departments, some retired and the junior faculty mostly went elsewhere. A few years later, Falcon and former university President Donald Kennedy put together what would become the Center for Environmental Science and Policy (CESP), out of which the program in Food Security and the Environment (FSE) later emerged.

What goes round comes round: One of FSE's most outstanding researchers, Scott Rozelle, started off his career at FRI, went to the University of California-Davis and today holds the same endowed chair that Falcon used to hold at FRI. Another of the former FRI scholars, Peter Timmer, who went on to hold endowed chairs at Cornell and Harvard, among other places, is back at FSE as a visiting professor teaching Pathways Out of Rural Poverty, cross-listed in Earth Systems, Economics and International Policy Studies.

The new institution differs from the old one in various ways, Falcon pointed out. It is a program, not a department, so it does not grant degrees. It is more explicitly multidisciplinary than FRI, which started off that way in the 1920s but as the decades passed became increasingly focused on agricultural economics. FSE has a stronger base in the sciences than FRI did. And, Falcon said, FSE is"more nimble" at forging partnerships. It's a more flexible beast, less encumbered, more able to respond to complex challenges straddling the natural, climate and social sciences.

Timing can make all the difference, Rozelle said.

"We were just at the start of globalization" when FRI was dismantled, he said."But now, at FSE, we're back in the mainstream. A big difference was John Hennessy and his philosophy of taking research to the world."