Interaction

Spring 2008

How to feed the planet

FSE post-doctoral scholar Jennifer Burney, top right, is working on a solar electrification project in Benin.
Photo: Marshall Burke

'Food security" doesn't refer to the problem of protecting food from theft or bioterrorism. Rather, it's the opposite of hunger. In practice, it means simply that most of the world's people have no security whatsoever that they will get enough food.

A joint program of the Freeman Spogli and Woods institutes, the Food Security and the Environment (FSE) program was established to generate innovative solutions to global hunger and its causes, be they related to climate, trade, science or politics.

FSE's director, Rosamond Naylor, said in the early stages of the program that her goal was"to put food and agriculture back on the map at major universities," particularly at Stanford. With her own research ranging from rice production to offshore fisheries to meat consumption, Naylor said then that her work was basically about one thing: how to feed the world. A few years later, what began as a research proposal is now a program.

"We're doing extremely well," said Deputy Director Walter Falcon. Though the program does not grant degrees, its researchers work closely with undergraduates and graduate students in the sciences and in interdisciplinary programs, as well as with the Goldman Honors program.

"There are more and more classes in the area of food," Falcon said. World Food Economy, which he and Naylor teach and which features a group project asking students to evaluate the world food system in 2030,"is famous," he said."The land-grant schools can't seem to get enough undergraduates; we can't find rooms large enough to hold them."

A good example of how food research is most definitely back on the map is the trajectory of Marshall Burke, FSE's program manager and himself a young researcher. He was an Earth Systems major when he went on a five-month program to Nepal sponsored by Cornell. When he returned to Stanford, he said, he wanted to shift gears, so he took World Food Economy. He got to know Naylor and Falcon, switched into International Relations and worked as a teaching assistant for the class. Once he graduated, he got a job at the Center for Environmental Science and Policy, which eventually spawned FSE.

Climate change

One of the most newsworthy areas of concentration at FSE is that of climate and food security. As the atmosphere heats up, sea levels rise and storm action increases, people whose access to food is shaky at the best of times may be in danger of literally starving. The loss of agricultural lands in arid or flooded areas will, in turn, affect millions of people worldwide. What happens to the world's seeds if temperatures rise 3 degrees? And what does that tell us about investment strategies for the next decades?

David Lobell monitors soil nitrogin in the Yaqui Valley, in Mexico.
Photo: Ivan Ortiz Monasterio

Among the people trying to answer those questions is David Lobell, a senior research scholar with a PhD in geological and environmental sciences. He was the lead author of a recent article in Science (co-authored by Burke, Falcon and Naylor, among others) that first identified 94 critical crops in 12 areas of the world that are home to the highest numbers of malnourished people. The researchers then matched that data to best-case, likely and worst-case climate data for the next 25 years based on Lobell's climate modeling work.

The Science research concluded that among the most endangered crops in the world is maize in southern Africa—which could essentially disappear over the next 30 years.

"It's a great example of interdisciplinary work," Lobell said."First you have the socio-economic research, figuring out which crops people depend on, and then you have the hardcore climate science, agronomy and nutrition. The study has started a great dialogue."

Lobell previously was a postdoctoral scholar at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, one of the world's outstanding centers for climate analysis. Using satellite, census and agricultural data, he devises simulations for climate change. (He got his start in that field with his dissertation for Pamela Matson, dean of the School of Earth Sciences, on agriculture in Mexico.)

Once climate scientists and social scientists do their work, figuring out which are the endangered crops, trade and investment experts can then step in. Which crops are going to increase in price? Does it make sense to invest in endangered crops or in societies structured around those crops?

"Some people say, these people should just switch crops," Lobell admitted."But other people, myself among them, say that habits are a lot harder to change than technology is. It's easy to transport seeds, and my view is pragmatic. We have to move very quickly. Thirty years is very little time."

Small farmers do not have access to 30 years' worth of climate data, and though they may note productivity changes from year to year, it is impossible for them to grasp the extent of the problem over the long run. Thus Lobell's climate projections are enormously valuable.

His numbers are also being applied closer to home: in the Napa and Sonoma valleys, where doctoral candidate Kim Cahill is working on her dissertation,"Global Change in Local Places." A fifth-generation resident of the wine country, Cahill has set up 12 field sites in pinot noir vineyards and is tracking the grapes against alterations in climate. As the weather gets warmer and more arid, growers will be able to both adapt their techniques and mitigate the damages, she says.

In addition to her dissertation work in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Environment and Resources (IPER), Cahill is collaborating with Lobell and her adviser, Christopher Field, on a project about the vulnerability of California agriculture. As with the Science article or, on a smaller scale, Cahill's dissertation, the point is to help growers, landowners and investors plan ahead.

For example, Cahill said,"avocados are at their optimal climate right now. Any increase in temperature will decrease yields, and that's true for most California crops. They're within 1 or 2 degrees of their limit."

The team of researchers is looking at 12 crops, including avocados, grapes, almonds, citrus fruits and strawberries, and plotting yields against 25 years of climate data.

Cahill was an undergraduate at Stanford, with a major in Earth Systems and a minor in Human Biology.

"That exposed me to a diversity of disciplines," she said."It's a challenge to personalize the mix of philosophies and tools and disciplines in order to address the problems you care about. I'm driven by questions in the real world. In more traditional disciplines, you train in tools. But if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

Biofuels and rising prices

A second, closely related cluster of researchers at FSE is working on biofuels. The agricultural space devoted today to biofuels used to be devoted to food. Ethanol, to take the most obvious example, puts pressure on the price of corn. That affects the price of land and of all other crops that become more scarce as corn becomes more plentiful. The price of eggs, bread and milk in the United States, for example, has increased this year because the price of feed has risen.

Chief among the biofuels researchers is agricultural economist Scott Rozelle, the Helen F.

Agricultural economist Scott Rozelle speaks with a colleague in China.
Photo: Marshall Burke

Farnsworth Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, who says he is more optimistic than his colleagues, who fear widespread starvation.

"I'm more positive than they are," said Rozelle."In the short run, there are lots of dangers. But in the long run, there are dynamic effects and it's the best thing that could happen to agriculture. Prices will invigorate markets in the long run."

Rozelle points to the fact that, for a century or so, food prices have gone down, driven by advances in science and technology that increased productivity. Biofuels mark a historic breakthrough on the demand side, he said, forcing prices up. So farmers shift to biofuel crops, forcing other prices up. Steep rice prices, for example, have led to the imposition of strict export limits in much of Asia, to shortages and to food riots in places that cannot obtain rice.

Rice farmers stand to gain; consumers do not. Rozelle, one of the world's most prominent experts in modern Chinese agricultural economics, says most Chinese own some land, so most everyone can expect to benefit from the biofuels phenomenon.

But not everyone everywhere owns land, and people can starve in the short run. A grant from the Gates Foundation is enabling FSE researchers (in conjunction with experts in Washington, D.C., China and Nebraska) to study the impact of biofuels, crop substitution and price and market shifts on the world's poor. The aim is to move beyond biofuels as an energy question to study them as a social question, to see when and where investments in biofuels might help or hinder the struggle against poverty.

There are several causes for the high prices, said Peter Timmer, a visiting professor at FSE and former Stanford faculty member at the Food Research Institute: Not just biofuels, but also rapid growth in demand in China and India, drought and disease in certain regions and the weak U.S. dollar, which increases demand for commodities.

"I see four important responses," he said: First, countries might try to subsidize or protect food, which won't work in the long run. Next, consumers might shift eating patterns; but for the very poor, this means starvation. Third, producers shift crops, add inputs and move into marginal lands. And finally, science responds with new varieties and techniques.

But, he pointed out,"the science and tech response has been so vigorous over the last two centuries that the long-run trend of agricultural prices has been steadily downward. The big question now is whether that historical trend is about to be reversed."

A recent article co-written by a group of FSE researchers tried to figure out how the expected shifts in commodity markets will affect consumers depending on which sort of biofuel is developed. Called"The Ripple Effect," the article studied linkages among energy, food and land prices, and the environment in the United States, Brazil, China and Indonesia, the four biggest biofuels players."The extent to which biofuels growth is compatible with sustainable development remains questionable," they said.

The section on oil palms was written by Joanne Gaskell, an IPER student.

Rosamond Naylor meets with millet farmers in India.
Photo: Courtesy FSE

“Palm oil is the cheapest vegetable oil in the global market," she said,"so it's attractive as a biodiesel feedstock." But there are serious environmental drawbacks limiting its potential, notably the conversion of rainforest to plantations. As in Brazil, the forests are burned and cleared, displacing species and polluting the air. In addition, political decentralization in Indonesia has made environmental management more precarious.

Rozelle, another of the authors of the article, studies these questions as they pertain to China, the world's largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions. China in 2007 prohibited crop production for bio-ethanol on land traditionally devoted to staple grain production, instead encouraging cultivation of minor crops and the use of marginal lands. It also is looking elsewhere in Asia to grow its crops.

How will China's massive growth affect the world agricultural economy? That's one of the questions being addressed by the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Rozelle is the chair of the center's board of academic advisers and a firm believer that its multidisciplinary approach will yield innovative solutions.

"We're known for multidisciplinary fieldwork," he said."We work with geographers, physicians, hydrologists, solving policy problems for the rural economy."

Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project in January 2008 began funding another FSE biofuels project, this one looking at the effect of biofuels expansion and large-scale land conversion on global climate. Not surprisingly, the principal investigators include Lobell, as well as Field and Naylor.

‘Deadly Connections'

Water shortages, hunger and market disruption can lead to disease and starvation. They also may lead to social upheaval. A third group of researchers at FSE is beginning to examine links between food scarcity and political turmoil. The venture is unique in bringing together political scientists and agricultural economists, who traditionally study poverty each in their own way.

The effort began after Naylor contacted Stephen Stedman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, who at the time was research director of the U.N. Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. The group's objective was to identify the world's most salient threats, which it found to be a difficult task. Sudan, for example, does not face the same sort of threats as England.

"The panel could either prioritize among very different threats or we could try to define threats in such a way as to validate all of them," Stedman said,"and we chose the latter approach." Defining threats as situations resulting in the large-scale loss of life and undermining of the state, they created six categories, among which were economic and social threats, including poverty, infectious disease and environmental degradation.

But all six clusters are interrelated, Stedman pointed out,"in ways we only dimly understand in some cases." Warfare, poverty, terrorism, even organized crime all have linkages.

Naylor saw that it would be important for FSE to incorporate those issues into the framework of food security, and she invited Stedman to join. In February 2006, they were among the researchers awarded one of the first grants by Stanford's Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies. Their project,"Feeding the World in the 21st Century," led to the formation of FSE.

One of the first projects, in fall 2006, was the"Deadly Connections" seminar. Among the participants was Jeremy Weinstein, assistant professor of political science, who presented his work on"AIDS, Security and Social Stability," a project for which he received his own Presidential Fund award.

"The seminar was a wonderful forum for people from a wide diversity of fields to think critically about the intersections among the environment, food security, health and stability," he said. This year, the seminar is on hold, and Stedman and Naylor hope next year to run a workshop that will help Stanford scholars figure out what research has been done on the various dyads (poverty-environment, disease-violence, climate-poverty, etc.), so as to determine the best way to proceed.

"If the net effect of climate change is to reinforce shortages of key resources and make economic growth more difficult, then yes, that makes for a conflict environment," Stedman said, adding that the means with which countries make themselves resilient to climate change may well be the same means that mitigate violence.

Though the causal relationship between climate change and political violence on the one hand seems logical, it also is hard to pinpoint and possibly can be overstated. But the United Nations has established climate change to be a security issue, and there is a growing feeling that the potential linkage should be made a research priority, with climate and conflict models being improved and better coupled.

At an evening session of the series on"Ethics of Food and the Environment" featuring the film Darwin's Nightmare, Naylor provided some thoughts on the linkages. The film portrays the social, economic and ecological devastation around Tanzania's Lake Victoria.

"Is Africa at a turning point?" she asked."The income from Lake Victoria's fish," monstrous perch that had eliminated all other species,"is destroying everything around it. Can there be broadly distributed sustained growth? Is there hope or not?"