February 10th marked the launch of the Program on Food Security and the Environment's Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series. Setting the stage for the two-year series were Jeff Raikes, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Greg Page, CEO and Chairman of Cargill Inc. As CEOs from the largest foundation and the largest agricultural firm in the world they provided important perspectives on global food security in these particularly volatile times. Full video and clips of the event are now available - Improving Food Security in the 21st Century: What are the Roles for Firms and Foundations.

Jeff Raikes: A Perspective from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Catalytic philanthropy

The Gates Foundation, through its Agricultural Development Initiative, has been a leader in addressing global food security issues. The Foundation allocates 25% of its resources to global development and to addressing the needs of the 1 billion people who live in extreme poverty ($1/day). 70-75% of those people live in rural areas and are dependent on subsistence agriculture for their livelihoods.

The Gates Foundation is driven by the principle: how can it invest its resources in ways that can leverage performance and address market failures? Its approach embodies a novel concept driven by both private sector motives and public responsibilities. Raikes describes this as catalytic philanthropy.

"The Foundation identifies where its investments can create an innovation, a new intervention that can really raise the quality of lives for people," said Raikes. "If successful, it can be scaled up and sustained by the private sector if we can show that there is a profit opportunity or the public sector if we can show that this is a better way to improve the overall quality of society through investment in public dollars."

Image Photo credit: Michael Prince

In the realm of agriculture, allocating resources across the agricultural value chain has proven to be the most effective approach. As an example of this strategy, Raikes talked about a farmer-owned, Gates-supported dairy chilling plant in Kenya. The cooling facility provided the storage necessary to provide a predictable price at which to sell farmers' milk. This price knowledge and market access gave farmers the confidence to invest in better technology and better dairy cattle. The plant also provided artificial insemination services and extension services to teach farmers how to get greater amounts of milk from the cattle.

"I love the concept. I also love the numbers," said Raikes. "In just two or three years there were now 3,000 farmers in a 25 kilometer radius that were able to access this dairy chilling plant and able to sell their milk."

In addition to improving incomes, Raikes remarked that very consistently what he hears is when farmers are able to improve their incomes the first thing they do with the money is invest in the education of their children.

Upcoming challenges to food security

During the next 40 years or so, global food production must double to accommodate a growing and richer population. Climate change and water scarcity contribute to this challenge. The places that will suffer the most severe weather are also the places where the poorest farmers live. 95% of sub-Saharan agriculture is rain fed with very little irrigation.

"If we are going to be able to feed the world we are going to have to figure out how to achieve more crop per drop," cautioned Raikes. "This includes trying to breed crop varieties that will better withstand water shortages. Early results show that you can get as much as a 20% increase in yield or more under stressed conditions when you have varieties that are bred for that need."

These challenges are compounded by the current economic crisis that is putting pressure on budgets in both donor and developing countries. In 2009, the G20 committed 22 billion dollars to agricultural development in recognition of the importance of agricultural development to food security. However, of the 22 billion promised, 224 million dollars went to five countries in the first round of grants in June. By November, when 21 additional countries submitted their proposals, just 97 million dollars were available to be dispersed and 17 countries were turned away empty handed.

High- and low-tech solutions

In an effort to alleviate some of this deficit, the Gates Foundation has committed 300 million dollars in six grants that span the value chain. These include investments in science and technology, farm management practices, farmer productivity, and market access as well as the data and policy environment to support the Foundation's work. The grants are intended to support about 5 ½ million farm families in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

"We believe innovative solutions can come from both high-tech and low-tech," said Raikes. "On the high-tech end, submergent genes are allowing rice crops to survive periods of flooding up to 15 days. In areas of rice farming prone to flooding, this can save entire crops traditionally wiped out by such weather disasters."

Image Photo credit IRRI/Ariel Javellana

The sub1gene seeds are now being used by 400,000 farmers and are on track to be used by 20 million rice farmers by 2017. On the low-tech end, the Gates Foundation is providing $2 triple layer bags to farmers to reduce crop loss from pests; an affordable solution that has increased average income per farmer by $150/year.

"We primarily support conventional breeding, but we also support biotechnology breeding. In some cases we think that breeders in Africa and South Asia will want to take advantage of the modern tools we use here in our country to provide better choices for their farmers," explained Raikes.

Reasons for optimism

After years of diminished support, US Agricultural Development assistance to sub-Saharan Africa has gone from about 650 million in 2005 to about 1.5 billion in 2009. In developing countries, the Comprehensive Agricultural Development Program (CADP) in Africa has challenged countries to dedicate 10% of their national budgets to agriculture with the goal of improving annual agricultural growth by 6%. 20 countries have signed on to the CADP compacts, and 10 countries are exceeding the 6% growth target. Finally, since 1990, 1.3 billion people worldwide have lifted themselves out of poverty primarily through improvements in agricultural productivity.

Raikes pointed to Ghana as a success story. Since 1990, casaba production, an important staple food for poor smallholder farmers, has increased fivefold. Tomato production increased six fold. The cocoa sector has been revived and hunger has been cut by 75%.

"The key to success in Ghana was a combination of getting the right developing country policy with the right macroeconomic reform, the right institutional reform, smart public investment, and an overall good policy environment," said Raikes.

Supporting good policy is an important part of the Foundation's food security strategy, and was a strong motivation behind its funding of FSE's Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium series.

"We see this symposium series as an opportunity to gather policy leaders who will bring new ideas of what will be effective policy approaches and effective economic environments in the countries we care a lot about, in particular sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia," said Raikes.

Raikes concluded his remarks by reminding everyone that the key to improving food security globally is making sure women, who make up at least 70% of the farm labor population, are included in the equation.

Greg Page: Balancing the race to caloric sufficiency with rural sociology

As the largest global agricultural firm, Cargill has an influential role to play in the world of food and agriculture. Cargill is a major supplier of food and crops and a provider of farmer services, inputs, and market access.

Image Photo credit: Olaf Hammelburg

Together with the Gates Foundation, Cargill has reached out and trained 200,000 cocoa farmers in the Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Cameroon. One tribe and one small village at a time the company has helped improve food safety, quality maintenance, and storage; benefiting the farmers, Cargill, and customers further down the supply chain. Cargill has also assisted, through financing and product purchasing, 265,000 farmers in Benin, Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast, Malawi, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Can the world feed itself?

A billion people lack sufficient caloric intake on a daily basis. In sub-Saharan Africa, 38% of all children are chronically malnourished, largely the result of inadequate agricultural productivity. While nine of the ten countries that have the highest prevalence of malnourishment are in sub-Saharan Africa, the two countries with the largest absolute number of malnourished people are India and China.

"This points to the difficulty of this problem," said Page. "India exports corn and soybean protein and China has 2.5 trillion dollars of hard currency reserves. These issues aren't necessarily of ability to feed people, but a willingness and commitment to do so."

Can the world feed itself? Yes, said Page.

When you break down the number of calories needed per malnourished person per day and convert that to tons of whole grains required to extinguish that hunger you get 30 million tons; 1/6 the amount of grain we converted to fuel globally last year. In the U.S. alone, 40% of our corn goes to ethanol.

"It isn't an issue of caloric famine-it is an issue of economic famine," stated Page. "In other words, this is not a food supply problem, but rather the lack of purchasing power to pay for a diet. An adequate price must be assured to reward the farmer for his efforts and to provide enough money that she can do it again the following year."

Rural sociology premium

What we face is the need to keep smallholders on the farm-despite the fact that they may not be the low-cost producer of foodstuffs-in order to avoid a rural population migration that would be unsustainable. As a result, the challenge the world faces is who is going to pay that rural sociology premium? If it costs more to raise crops on small farms is that burden going to be borne by the urban poor or is there going to be an alternative funding mechanism that allows smallholders to succeed?

Image Photo credit: Cargill

What is the survival price for a smallholder farmer? Page explained that if you wanted a family of four on a farm in sub-Saharan Africa to receive an income commensurate with the average per capita income of the urban population, you would come up with a price near $400 a ton.

"To put this in context, the highest price for maize that has ever been reached here in the United States is about $275 a ton," said Page. "This rural sociology premium to sustain smallholders is not an insignificant amount of money. How do we achieve fairness between the revenue received by the rural smallholder and the price borne by the urban consumer?"

State of disequilibrium - complacency to crisis

Today we are experiencing incredible price volatility where commodity prices are in a continuous state of disequilibrium. Very small changes in production have outsized impacts on price. This is in contrast to the last two and a half decades when the world operated with fairly robust stocks due to crop subsidies in the United States and Western Europe.

"This period of subsidization was when the western world probably did more harm to sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia than any other period in history," said Page. "We refused to allow price to signal to western farmers to produce less. As a result, the world price of grains fell far below the ability of any smallholder to compete. We then shipped those surpluses to developing countries, which then failed to invest in their agriculture for decades."

Today we are lurching from complacency to crisis. The ability of information and market speculation to be transmitted rapidly is affecting purchasing decisions of thousands to millions of consumers. Rising fuel prices, export restrictions, increasing demand for crops for biofuels, and unpredictable weather have all contributed to higher prices. Some of the drivers of price, however, are good things, such as the increase in per capita income and the capacity of more people to have a more dense and nutritious diet.

"Interestingly, the upside of the ethanol and biofuels program is that it brought prices back to a sufficiency that reinvigorated investment in agriculture," noted Page. "On one level I think a very good argument could be made that the biofuels program brought the world further from famine than it ever had been because of the price."

Critical food security factors

Page concluded by summarizing the elements that Cargill believes are critically important to increase food security. The first is the ability to understand the tradeoffs between a fast path to caloric sufficiency and the needs of rural sociology. Second, that crops be grown in the right soil, with the right technology, and relying on free trade so we can harvest competitive advantage to its fullest.

Another critical factor is rural property rights. Smallholders must have the ability to own the land, have access to it, and transfer it to future generations if you want a farmer to reinvest in his farm, said Page.

"Smallholders in developing countries need some degree of revenue certainty and access to a reliable market if we expect them to do what their countries really need them to do, which is raise productivity," explained Page. "Today they are often forced to sell at harvest, often below the cost of production, and lack the storage capabilities and capital to provide crops sufficiently and continuously."

Open, trust-based markets also play a key role in ensuring food security. Governments need to support trade. When Russia, Ukraine, and Argentina turned to embargos as a way to protect domestic food prices open markets were jeopardized and price volatility increased. Finally, there are very important roles for the world's governments in the creation of infrastructure that is vital to provide access to markets.

"I believe fully and completely in the world's capacity to harvest photosynthesis to feed every single person and to do it at prices that can be borne by all," concluded Page.

The February 10 Liberation Technology seminar titled, Can ICT Improve Clean Water Delivery Systems in Slums? Lessons from Kibera was led by two Stanford students, Katherine Hoffman, M.A. Candidate in International Policy Studies and Global Health together with Sunny Jeon, PhD candidate in Political Science. Hoffman and Jeon presented on the topic of the M-Maji system, a start-up non-profit project that uses mobile phones to empower communities with better information about water availability, price, and quality. M-Maji emerged from the Designing Liberation Technologies course taught at the Stanford d.school, which is dedicated to using mobile phone technology for health improvement in Kibera.  

The M-Maji project was conceived to confront a specific need in one of Africa's largest informal settlements: Nairobi's Kibera slum. Kibera holds about one quarter of Nairobi's population, but lacks a formal water and sanitation system. In short, water in Kibera is scarce, costly, uncertain, and often contaminated. The cost of water can rise up to over $3 per square meter during a shortage, and often takes up 20% of residents' income. Water is uncertain because about 40% of vendors in Kibera do not have access to a constant supply of water, especially since many of the connections that they do use are illegal. Additionally, water is often contaminated because water pipes run through sewer areas and are often plastic, since metal pipes would be taken as scrap. The result of these conditions is that the average person spends about 55 minutes per day looking for water, and about 68% of residents use informal water kiosks to access water.

M-Maji is a mobile platform designed to address problems facing both the seller and buyer of water in Kibera. Sellers report information about water availability and price at their water kiosk, enabling them to attract customers. Meanwhile, buyers access the system to find information about where water is available, at what price and at what level of quality. A third feature of the platform enables complaints and feedback regarding water sources. By coordinating and centralizing water information from multiple sources, M-Maji is designed to empower residents with better information about water availability, price, and quality, which ultimately helps to improve access to clean water.

There are several key reasons why a mobile platform that tackles the information side of the problem may be effective in solving the water problem in Kibera:

1. The water market is distorted, but not coordinated. Also, there is significant variation between neighborhoods.
2. Information asymmetry exists that is not solved by other sources or tools.
3. M-maji is needs-driven.
4. Relative to other interventions, M-Maji is cost-sensitive and low tech.

Although fieldwork conducted by the M-Maji team has indicated great potential for the platform's success, the team has also faced many challenges in implementation. One example stems from the platform's use of USSD sessions. Like SMS, these sessions allow short messages (up to 182 characters) to be exchanged. Users must enter a short code to begin a session, which then lasts about 2 minutes. However, the team has faced significant difficulty in getting mobile operators to allow access to USSD (in Swahili), as well as to negotiate rate agreements with mobile operators. The involvement of gangs and government in the water market introduces another challenges. In some cases, gangs bribe utility people to restrict the supply to push up prices, which may hinder the eventual effectiveness of the M-Maji tool.

Following the formation of a partnership with an important local NGO in Kibera called Umande Trust, M-Maji is moving rapidly into the pilot stage. The team is currently working to carry out a randomized impact evaluation to obtain convincing estimates of M-Maji's cost-effectiveness and impact on water outcomes. With the help of the community partner, the team is running a six-month long pilot on the West side of Kibera. In addition to surveying 1000 households for the baseline survey, the team is also carrying out data collection on water prices and water quality. M-Maji will officially launch in May or June of 2011, and the team will continue to reassess the project to better meet user needs as the results of the pilot become available.

As Japan's nuclear troubles continue, CISAC's Alan Hanson discusses the range of scenarios and how to prevent catastrophe.

CISAC: What is the range of events that could happen over the next several days and weeks?

Alan Hanson: The earthquake and resulting tsunami that hit northern Japan last Friday are unprecedented in modern times. These two nearly simultaneous natural disasters did significant damage to the Fukushima nuclear power stations operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). Despite this damage, including a total loss of off-site power and emergency backup power, TEPCO personnel have been making a heroic effort to bring the situation under control. To date off-site releases of radiation appear not to have had severe effects to the local population; because of prevailing westerly winds, the radiation releases have not been in the direction of major population centers.

It is impossible to predict the sequence of events that will unfold over the next few days and weeks. Under the best of circumstances, TEPCO will continue to take actions limiting further releases. To do so they must continue to cool the nuclear fuel in two separate regions of each reactor in the two stations; these regions are the reactor core itself and the used fuel storage pool. This means that enough water must be continually injected to keep the fuel covered. More dire circumstances could occur if the nuclear fuel is uncovered for a lengthy period of time. In the reactor core, this could lead to partial or total fuel melting, followed by failure of the primary steel containment due to excessive heat and pressure. Since some fuel has been uncovered for some time intervals, it is believed that partial melting may have already occurred and that the primary containment has been damaged in one or two of the reactors. If used fuel in the storage pools is uncovered, it could lead to fuel cladding failures from high temperatures releasing radioactive gases directly into the atmosphere. In a very unlikely scenario burning of the fuel cladding would release more gases and also particulate matter into the atmosphere. The reactor cores are of immediate concern because that is where the highest temperatures are located. The fuel pools become of greater concern over the intermediate term as water is boiled off or if some other event causes draining of a pool.

CISAC: What can be done to prevent the worst?

Hanson: Both worst-case scenarios described above can be prevented by keeping the nuclear fuel covered with water by any means available including the use of sea water, which has been initiated already. The weather will play an important role, too. As long as winds blow radioactive gases off shore and away from population centers, the public health effects should be minimal; if winds shift and blow toward Japanese cities, the situation would be significantly worse.

CISAC: How can we prevent this sort of thing from happening again?

Hanson: It is too early to speculate about the possibility of future accidents such as this one. Suffice it to say that the combination of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and a 30-plus foot tsunami is a highly unlikely event. If early reports from the site turn out to be true, the reactors rode out the earthquake reasonably well and all of them shut down in the orderly fashion planned for an earthquake. Without the subsequent tsunami, it is very doubtful that the ongoing crisis at Fukushima would be anywhere near the magnitude we are witnessing. The nuclear industry has a good record of learning from accidents and making the appropriate changes to prevent reoccurrence or to at least mitigate the consequences should something similar happen in the future. Actions will certainly be taken by the industry and regulatory bodies in this vein once the immediate emergency is behind us.

Over the course of three short months, popular uprisings have toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, sparked a civil war in Libya and created unrest in other parts of the Middle East. They also have raised a question in many people's minds: Are all authoritarian regimes now threatened by this new democratic wave? In particular, is China, a rising superpower, vulnerable to these forces?  

The Communist government in Beijing is clearly worried. It has limited news coverage of the recent uprisings and has clamped down on democratic activists and foreign reporters, acting pre-emptively against anonymous calls on the Internet for China to have its own "Jasmine Revolution." A recent front-page editorial in the Beijing Daily, an organ of the city's party committee, declared that most people in the Middle East were unhappy with the protests in their countries, which were a "self-delusional ruckus" orchestrated by a small minority. For his part, President Hu Jintao has urged the strengthening of what has been dubbed the "Great Firewall"-the sophisticated apparatus of censorship and surveillance that the regime uses to control access to the Internet.

No social scientist or intelligence analyst predicted the specific timing or spread of the Arab uprising-the fact that it would start in Tunisia, of all places, that it would be triggered by an event like the self-immolation of a vegetable seller, or that protests would force the mighty Egyptian army to abandon Hosni Mubarak. Over the past generation, Arab societies have appeared stolidly stable. Why they suddenly exploded in 2011 is something that can be understood only in retrospect, if at all.

But this doesn't mean that we can't think about social revolutions in a more structured way. Even unpredictable things take place in a certain context, and the present-day situations of China and the Middle East are radically different. Most of the evidence suggests that China is pretty safe from the democratic wave sweeping other parts of the world-at least for now.

Perhaps the most relevant thinker for understanding the Middle East today and China tomorrow is the late Samuel Huntington-not the Huntington of "The Clash of Civilizations," who argued that there were fundamental incompatibilities between Islam and democracy, but the Huntington whose classic book "Political Order in Changing Societies," first published in 1968, laid out his theory of the development "gap."

Observing the high levels of political instability plaguing countries in the developing world during the 1950s and '60s, Mr. Huntington noted that increasing levels of economic and social development often led to coups, revolutions and military takeovers. This could be explained, he argued, by a gap between the newly mobilized, educated and economically empowered people and their existing political system-that is, between their hopes for political participation and institutions that gave them little or no voice. Attacks against the existing political order, he noted, are seldom driven by the poorest of the poor in such a society; they tend to be led, instead, by rising middle classes who are frustrated by the lack of political and economic opportunity.

All of these observations would seem to apply to Tunisia and Egypt. Both countries have made substantial social progress in recent decades. The Human Development Indices compiled by the United Nations (a composite measure of health, education and income) increased by 28% for Egypt and 30% for Tunisia between 1990 and 2010. The number of people going to school has grown substantially; Tunisia especially has produced large numbers of college graduates. And indeed, the protests in Tunisia and Egypt were led in the first instance by educated, tech-savvy middle-class young people, who expressed to anyone who would listen their frustrations with societies in which they were not allowed to express their views, hold leaders accountable for corruption and incompetence, or get a job without political connections.

Mr. Huntington stressed the destabilizing power of new social groups seeking political participation. People used to be mobilized by newspapers and radio; today they are spurred to action by cell phones, Facebook and Twitter, which allow them to share their grievances about the existing system and to learn about the possibilities of the larger world. This change in the Middle East has been incredibly rapid, and it has trumped, for now, old verities about the supposed passivity of Arab culture and the resistance of Islam to modernization.

But do these remarkable developments tell us anything about the possibility for future instability in China?

It is certainly true that the dry tinder of social discontent is just as present in China as in the Middle East. The incident that triggered the Tunisian uprising was the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, who had his vegetable cart repeatedly confiscated by the authorities and who was slapped and insulted by the police when he went to complain. This issue dogs all regimes that have neither the rule of law nor public accountability: The authorities routinely fail to respect the dignity of ordinary citizens and run roughshod over their rights. There is no culture in which this sort of behavior is not strongly resented.

This is a huge problem throughout China. A recent report from Jiao Tong University found that there were 72 "major" incidents of social unrest in China in 2010, up 20% over the previous year. Most outside observers would argue that this understates the real number of cases by perhaps a couple of orders of magnitude. Such incidents are hard to count because they often occur in rural areas where reporting is strictly controlled by the Chinese authorities.

The most typical case of outraged dignity in contemporary China is a local government that works in collusion with a private developer to take away the land of peasants or poor workers to make way for a glittery new project, or a company that dumps pollutants into a town's water supply and gets away with it because the local party boss stands to profit personally. Though corruption in China does not reach the predatory levels of certain African or Middle Eastern countries, it is nonetheless pervasive. People see and resent the privileged lives of the nation's elite and their children. The movie "Avatar" was a big hit in China in part because so many ordinary Chinese identified with the indigenous people it portrayed whose land was being stolen by a giant, faceless corporation.

There is, moreover, a huge and growing problem of inequality in China. The gains from China's remarkable growth have gone disproportionately to the country's coastal regions, leaving many rural areas far behind. China's Gini index-a standard measure of income inequality across a society-has increased to almost Latin American levels over the past generation. By comparison, Egypt and Tunisia have a much more equal income distribution.

According to Mr. Huntington, however, revolutions are made not by the poor but by upwardly mobile middle-class people who find their aspirations stymied, and there are lots of them in China. Depending on how you define it, China's middle class may outnumber the whole population of the United States. Like the middle-class people of Tunisia and Egypt, those in China have no opportunities for political participation. But unlike their Middle Eastern counterparts, they have benefited from a dramatically improving economy and a government that has focused like a laser beam on creating employment for exactly this group.

To the extent that we can gauge Chinese public opinion through surveys like Asia Barometer, a very large majority of Chinese feel that their lives have gotten better economically in recent years. A majority of Chinese also believe that democracy is the best form of government, but in a curious twist, they think that China is already democratic and profess to be satisfied with this state of affairs. This translates into a relatively low degree of support for any short-term transition to genuine liberal democracy.

Indeed, there is some reason to believe that the middle class in China may fear multiparty democracy in the short run, because it would unleash huge demands for redistribution precisely from those who have been left behind. Prosperous Chinese see the recent populist polarization of politics in Thailand as a warning of what democracy may bring.

The fact is that authoritarianism in China is of a far higher quality than in the Middle East. Though not formally accountable to its people through elections, the Chinese government keeps careful track of popular discontents and often responds through appeasement rather than repression. Beijing is forthright, for example, in acknowledging the country's growing income disparities and for the past few years has sought to mitigate the problem by shifting new investments to the poor interior of the country. When flagrant cases of corruption or abuse appear, like melamine-tainted baby formula or the shoddy school construction revealed by the Sichuan earthquake, the government holds local officials brutally accountable-sometimes by executing them.

Another notable feature of Chinese government is self-enforced leadership turnover. Arab leaders like Tunisia's Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt's Mr. Mubarak and Libya's Col. Moammar Gadhafi never knew when to quit, hanging on 23, 30 and 41 years, respectively. Since Mao, the Chinese leadership has rigidly adhered to terms of about a decade. Mr. Hu, the current president, is scheduled to step down in 2012, when he is likely to be replaced by Vice President Xi Jinping. Leadership turnover means that there is more policy innovation, in sharp contrast to countries like Tunisia and Egypt, which have been stuck for decades in the rut of crony capitalism.

The Chinese government is also more clever and ruthless in its approach to repression. Sensing a clear threat, the authorities never let Western social media spread in the first place. Facebook and Twitter are banned, and content on websites and on China-based social media is screened by an army of censors. It is possible, of course, for word of government misdeeds to get out in the time between its first posting by a micro-blogger and its removal by a censor, but this cat-and-mouse game makes it hard for a unified social space to emerge.

A final critical way in which China's situation differs from that of the Middle East lies in the nature of its military. The fate of authoritarian regimes facing popular protests ultimately depends on the cohesiveness and loyalty of its military, police and intelligence organizations. The Tunisian army failed to back Mr. Ben Ali early on; after some waffling, the Egyptian army decided it would not fire on protesters and pushed Mr. Mubarak out of power.

In China, the People's Liberation Army is a huge and increasingly autonomous organization with strong economic interests that give it a stake in the status quo. As in the Tiananmen uprising in 1989, it has plenty of loyal units around the country that it could bring into Beijing or Shanghai, and they would not hesitate to fire on demonstrators. The PLA also regards itself as the custodian of Chinese nationalism. It has developed an alternative narrative of 20th-century history that places itself at the center of events like the defeat of Japan in the Pacific war and the rise of a modern China. It is very unlikely that the PLA would switch sides and support a democratic uprising.

The bottom line is that China will not catch the Middle Eastern contagion anytime soon. But it could easily face problems down the road. China has not experienced a major recession or economic setback since it set out on its course of economic reform in 1978. If the country's current property bubble bursts and tens of millions of people are thrown out of work, the government's legitimacy, which rests on its management of the economy, would be seriously undermined.

Moreover, Mr. Huntington's scenario of rising but unfulfilled expectations among the middle class may still play out. Though there is a labor shortage among low-skill workers in China today, there is a glut of the college educated. Every year into the future, China will graduate more than seven million people from its universities, up from fewer than a million in 1998, and many of them are struggling to find work suitable to their self-perceived status. Several million unemployed college graduates are far more dangerous to a modernizing regime than hundreds of millions of poor peasants.

There is also what the Chinese themselves call the "bad emperor" problem. China's historical achievement over the centuries has been the creation of high-quality centralized bureaucratic government. When authoritarian rulers are competent and reasonably responsible, things can go very well. Indeed, such decision-making is often more efficient than in a democracy. But there is no guarantee that the system will always produce good rulers, and in the absence of the rule of law and electoral checks on executive power, there is no way to get rid of a bad emperor. The last bad emperor, commonly (if quietly) acknowledged as such, was Mao. We can't know what future tyrant, or corrupt kleptocrat, may be waiting in the wings in China's future.

The truth is that, much as we might theorize about the causes of social revolution, human societies are far too complex, and change too rapidly, for any simple theory to provide a reliable guide. Any number of observers dismissed the power of the "Arab street" to bring about political change, based on their deep knowledge of the Middle East, and they were right every year-up until 2011.

The hardest thing for any political observer to predict is the moral element. All social revolutions are driven by intense anger over injured dignity, an anger that is sometimes crystallized by a single incident or image that mobilizes previously disorganized individuals and binds them into a community. We can quote statistics on education or job growth, or dig into our knowledge of a society's history and culture, and yet completely miss the way that social consciousness is swiftly evolving through a myriad of text messages, shared videos or simple conversations.

The central moral imponderable with regard to China is the middle class, which up to now has seemed content to trade political freedom for rising incomes and stability. But at some point this trade-off is likely to fail; the regime will find itself unable to deliver the goods, or the insult to the dignity of the Chinese people will become too great to tolerate. We shouldn't pretend that we can predict when this tipping point will occur, but its eventual arrival, as Samuel Huntington might have suggested, is bound up with the very logic of modernization itself.

A hidden trove of historical crop yield data from Africa shows that corn - long believed to tolerate hot temperatures - is a likely victim of global warming.

Stanford agricultural scientist David Lobell and researchers at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) report in the inaugural issue of Nature Climate Change next week that a clear negative effect of warming on maize - or corn - production was evident in experimental crop trial data conducted in Africa by the organization and its partners from 1999 to 2007.

Led by Lobell, the researchers combined data from 20,000 trials in sub-Saharan Africa with weather data recorded at stations scattered across the region. They found that a temperature rise of a single degree Celsius would cause yield losses for 65 percent of the present maize-growing region in Africa - provided the crops received the optimal amount of rainfall. Under drought conditions, the entire maize-growing region would suffer yield losses, with more than 75 percent of areas predicted to decline by at least 20 percent for 1 degree Celsius of warming.

"The pronounced effect of heat on maize was surprising because we assumed maize to be among the more heat-tolerant crops," said Marianne Banziger, co-author of the study and deputy director general for research at CIMMYT."

"Essentially, the longer a maize crop is exposed to temperatures above 30 C, or 86 F, the more the yield declines," she said. "The effect is even larger if drought and heat come together, which is expected to happen more frequently with climate change in Africa, Asia or Central America, and will pose an added challenge to meeting the increasing demand for staple crops on our planet."

Similar sources of information elsewhere in the developing world could improve crop forecasting for other vast regions where data has been lacking, according to Lobell, who is lead author of the paper describing the study.

"Projections of climate change impacts on food production have been hampered by not knowing exactly how crops fair when it gets hot," Lobell said. "This study helps to clear that issue up, at least for one important crop."

While the crop trials have been run for many years throughout Africa, to identify promising varieties for release to farmers, nobody had previously examined the weather at the trial sites and studied the effect of weather on the yields, said Lobell, who is an assistant professor of environmental earth system science and fellow at Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment.

"These trials were organized for completely different purposes than studying the effect of climate change on the crops," he said. "They had a much shorter term goal, which was to get the overall best-performing strains into the hands of farmers growing maize under a broad range of conditions."

The data recorded at the yield testing sites did not include weather information. Instead, the researchers used data gathered from weather stations all over sub-Saharan Africa. Although the stations were operated by different organizations, all data collection was organized by the World Meteorological Organization, so the methods used were consistent.

Lobell then took the available weather data and interpolated between recording stations to infer what the weather would have been like at the test sites. By merging the weather and crop data, the researchers could examine climate impacts.

"It was like sending two friends on a blind date - we weren't sure how it would go, but they really hit it off," Lobell said.

Previously, most research on climate change impacts on agriculture has had to rely on crop data from studies in the temperate regions of North America and Europe, which has been a problem.

"When you take a model that has been developed with data from one kind of environment, such as a temperate climate, and apply it to the rest of the world, there are lots of things that can go wrong" Lobell said, noting that much of the developing world lies in tropical or subtropical climates.

But he said many of the larger countries in the developing world, such as India, China and Brazil, which encompass a wide range of climates, are running yield testing programs that could be a source of comparable data. Private agribusiness companies are also increasingly doing crop testing in the tropics.

"We're hoping that with this clear demonstration of the value of this kind of data for assessing climate impacts on crops that others will either share or take a closer look themselves at their data for various crops," Lobell said.

"I think we may just be scratching the surface of what can be achieved by combining existing knowledge and data from the climate and agriculture communities. Hopefully this will help catalyze some more effort in this area."

Lobell is a Center Fellow at the Program on Food Security and the Environment, a joint program of Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

The work was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation

Go out there and change the world.
- Tim Draper, Draper Fisher Jurvetson

"Whatever the world looks like now, it will change," said Tim Draper, founder and managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), during the keynote session at the March 1 Entrepreneurship in the Global Marketplace seminar, organized by the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) with sponsorship from Alibaba.com, the first in a series of seminars by the Schwarzenegger Emerging Entrepreneur Initiative. Concluding his remarks, Draper urged the overflow audience: "Go out there and change the world."

Draper and the nine other participants shared different perspectives on entrepreneurship, but a key message underlying all of the presentations was that the world is a dynamic, rapidly changing place where entrepreneurs can succeed by anticipating and responding to global trends. In doing so, many suggested, it is also possible to change the world—for the better. The participants all concurred that China is one of the key places in the world—now and in the future—to do business, representing a challenging but a vast frontier of opportunity.

Global demographic trends are a major factor that venture capitalists consider when making investments. Addressing the worldwide aging phenomenon, which is particularly acute in Asia-Pacific countries such as Japan and China, Draper explained how DFJ has invested in a company that manufactures videogame-like devices designed to improve cognition, noting the growing market for such devices that help keep cognitive health apace with a longer life span. Hans Tung, a partner with the Shanghai-based venture capital firm Qiming Ventures, described how his firm is tracking the large segment of China's population living in small cities away from commercial hubs. These members of the populace, who prefer to shop online where they can find a wider selection of goods than in their local shopping malls, are quickly becoming a driving force in China's e-commerce market.

It is China's e-commerce and other Internet firms—fueled by the explosion of Internet users—that carry increasingly significant weight in China's domestic and the global economy. Duncan Clark, a visiting scholar at SPRIE, presented related findings from SPRIE's China 2.0: The Rise of a Digital Superpower research initiative, which is led by Marguerite Gong Hancock, associate director of SPRIE. China 2.0, explores the conditions generating such rapid growth of the Internet, and investigates questions surrounding the possible global implications of it. Clark noted that as China's three largest Internet firms—search engine Baidu, instant-messaging service Tencent, and e-commerce portal Taobao—expand, domestic competition will not only intensify, but move further into the global economic arena. The "big three" firms are already ranked among the top 20 Internet sites in the world based on site traffic. According to Clark, the key question in the future for U.S. companies will be how to partner with Chinese companies in order to insure their own growth.

Riding the global wave of innovation and entrepreneurship, Jonathan Ross Shriftman, co-founder of Solé Bicycle Company, and Ryder Fyrwald, vice president of global operations at the Kairos Society, have discovered opportunities to effect positive change despite a global climate of intense economic competition. Shriftman, a recent University of Southern California (USC) graduate, described the lessons that he has learned through his company's quest to manufacture low-cost, quality fixed-gear bicycles that provide a stylish, alternate form of transportation. Despite funding and language challenges, Shriftman and his partner succeeded in connecting with a manufacturer in China through Alibaba.com, and have sold nearly 800 bicycles to date. Fyrwald, who is still an undergraduate at USC's Marshall School of Business, explained the philosophy behind the Kairos Society, an international network of student entrepreneurs who seek to solve world issues through entrepreneurship and innovation. He cited the example of WaterWalla, a company that has developed, among other technologies, a low-cost water purification device for use by urban slum dwellers.

From the perspective of seasoned venture capitalists Draper and Tung and emerging entrepreneurs Shriftman and Fyrwald, the message at Entrepreneurship in the Global Marketplace was clear: the way to succeed in a rapidly changing world is to react promptly—and creatively—to global trends. And, as Shriftman suggested, it is possible to "do well by doing good," and change the world in a positive way.