"Right now, the world is closer than ever before to ending global hunger, undernutrition, and extreme poverty, but significant challenges and opportunities remain, including urbanization, gender inequality, instability and conflict, the effects of a changing climate, and environmental degradation. Despite our collective progress in global food security and nutrition over recent years, a projected 702 million people still live in extreme poverty, nearly 800 million people around the world are chronically undernourished, and 159 million children under five are stunted. Food security is not just an economic and humanitarian issue; it is also a matter of security, as growing concentrations of poverty and hunger leave countries and communities vulnerable to increased instability, conflict, and violence." From the USAID Oct. 3 release.  

You can read more and download the pdf of the Global Food Security Strategy at the USAID website. 

For Matthew Kohrman and his students, the war against tobacco needs a new communications strategy.

After all, he noted, three times as many cigarettes are currently manufactured and sold worldwide than were in the 1960s. And the global cigarette industry is the greatest cause of preventable death on the planet today.

That’s why the Stanford associate professor of anthropology decided to teach an introductory seminar this spring, Anthro 182N, titled Smoke and Mirrors in Global Health. Kohrman led his 10 students on a journey into the “strange optics” that the global tobacco industry uses – and what to do about them.

As noted in the syllabus, “entrenched challenges” to global health require society to develop “new methods” to communicate the real truth about tobacco.

Just what are those “new methods?” At the culmination of the class, the students presented some variations on that theme. Their end-of-the-quarter projects were web-based efforts profiling various features of global tobacco. They included exposés on how academicians in China assist the industry in that country, humorous parodies and critiques of Philip Morris, and flawed approaches to tobacco control in South Korea.

They tackled big-picture questions, Kohrman said. For example, they asked what exactly constitutes cigarette manufacturing and how new strategies could help slow the spread of tobacco-related diseases worldwide.

Kohrman, the director of Stanford’s Cigarette Citadels project, envisioned his class as a way for students to offer some thought-provoking and original ideas grounded in solid data. After viewing the student projects, he was astounded – and proud.

“My overall impression has been a feeling of awe,” he said. “Mostly freshmen and sophomores, the students who enrolled in this new course quickly synthesized complex intellectual concepts introduced early in the quarter, conceived their own innovative project ideas, collected relevant data, generously worked with each other, designed apt strategies for evocatively visualizing their messages, and chose and implemented strong interactive media tools – most of which were utterly new to me.”

One of those students was Minkee Sohn, a communication major, who created a video, “Fresh Recruits,” to highlight what he believes is the hypocrisy in the language of some cigarette manufacturers’ recruitment efforts.

“While cigarette manufacturers,” Sohn said, “often frame smoking as an act of free choice, that choice is just an illusion. Free choice is denied to people in all stages of cigarette manufacturing and consumption.”

For example, he explained that children in the African country of Malawi are coerced to work with their families in tobacco fields. “It’s deeply disturbing to hear companies associate freedom with high-paying jobs in cigarette manufacturing.”

For biology major Annabel Chen, the most important thing she learned was to analyze information skeptically. “Industries like big tobacco have influences in unexpected places, so you always need to do sleuthing to find out the truth,” she said.

She chose to examine the links between tobacco and academic research in China. “Seeing as China is the biggest tobacco market in the world, this was a problem we needed to address.”

Kohrman appreciates how students like Sohn and Chen were willing to try an experimental course, never taught before, and which for many was outside of their comfort zone. He said the course will be taught again in 2015-16.

“Looking back, it was the perfect-size group for all the work and one-on-one teaching we did,” he said.

The course was a classic collaboration, according to Kohrman, who also credits Claudia Engel, a lecturer in the Anthropology Department who helped with the technology and his own experiences mentoring undergraduate research, all of which proved instrumental to designing Smoke and Mirrors in Global Health.

“It was a great success today,” he said after seeing the student projects on the last day of class. Tom Glynn, a top adviser to the American Cancer Society, was on hand to see the presentations.

Kohrman added, “Students got tremendous feedback, and there was lots of enthusiasm about how this experimental course unfolded.”

Clifton Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.

Bad weather in sub-Saharan Africa increases the spread of HIV, according to a study published in the June 2015 issue of the Economic Journal, co-authored by Stanford professor and FSE fellow Marshall Burke.

When the rains fail, farmers in rural areas often see their incomes fall dramatically and will try to make up for it however they can, including through sex work. Analysing data on more than 200,000 individuals across 19 African countries, the research team finds that by changing sexual behaviour, a year of very low rainfall can increase local infection rates by more than 10%.

The results have important policy implications for fighting the spread of the epidemic, as co-author Erick Gong of Middlebury College notes:

‘Existing approaches to stopping the spread of HIV – such as promoting condom use and the use of anti-retrovirals – remain critically important. But our results suggest that other policy approaches could be very useful too – in particular, approaches that provide safety nets to rural households when the weather turns bad.’

Policies and investments seemingly unrelated to HIV – such as the promotion of rural insurance or household savings schemes, or the development of drought-tolerant crops – might have surprising benefits in slowing the HIV epidemic. Co-author Kelly Jones of the International Food Policy Research Institute says:

‘The HIV/AIDS epidemic remains one of the world’s greatest health challenges, with over a million new infections per year in Africa alone. Our results expand the menu of options for addressing the epidemic, and highlight some surprising options that are not at the forefront of people’s minds.’

The research sheds valuable light on why HIV continues to spread in Africa. Previous studies have documented in limited settings that poor women often alter their sexual behaviour in response to an income shortfall. But until now, there has been little evidence that this response is big enough to affect the trajectory of the HIV epidemic.

To fill this gap, the researchers combined data on the HIV status of thousands of people across sub-Saharan Africa with data on the recent rainfall history in each individual’s location.

Because years of low rainfall can lead to much lower incomes in these locations, particularly in rural areas where people depend more heavily on agriculture for their livelihoods, variation in rainfall provides a way to study how changes in local economic conditions affect infection rates. Co-author Marshall Burke comments:

‘We were surprised by how strong the relationship is between recent rainfall fluctuations and local infection rates. As expected, the relationship is much stronger in rural areas, and particularly for women who report working in agriculture. These are the people who really suffer when the rains fail, and who are forced to turn to more desperate measures to make ends meet.’

Notes for editors: ‘Income Shocks and HIV in Africa’ by Marshall Burke, Erick Gong and Kelly Jones is published in the June 2015 issue of the Economic Journal.

Marshall Burke is an assistant professor of Earth System Science at Stanford University. Erick Gong is an assistant professor of economics at Middlebury College. Kelly Jones is a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

For further information: contact Marshall Burke on +1-650-736-8571 (email: mburke@stanford.edu); Erick Gong on +1-802-443-5553 (email: egong@middlebury.edu); Kelly Jones on +1-202-862-4641 (email: k.jones@cgiar.org); or Romesh Vaitilingam on +44-7768-661095 (email: romesh@vaitilingam.com; Twitter: @econromesh).