Twelve-year-old Lena is growing up poor and malnourished on Chicago’s West Side. She buys Blue Juice and Hot Chips from the corner store on her way to school. She and her classmates can afford the flavoured sugar water and salty starch, but this cheap “food” that fills up her stomach provides no nutritional value.
Lena is one of over 20 million Americans living in food deserts, places without access to a full-service grocery store within two miles. Yet while Lena buys her Hot Chips, an affluent family nearby uses an online retail platform to order their weekly delivery of fresh, nutritious food – at prices that Lena and her family can’t afford. Despite a surge of technology innovations in food retail, Lena and her family represent a growing number of underserved customers around the world.
The rising level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means that crops are becoming less nutritious, and that change could lead to higher rates of malnutrition that predispose people to various diseases.
That conclusion comes from an analysis published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Medicine, which also examined how the risk could be alleviated. In the end, cutting emissions, and not public health initiatives, may be the best response, according to the paper's authors, which includes Stanford Health Policy's Eran Bendavid and Sanjay Basu.
Research has already shown that crops like wheat and rice produce lower levels of essential nutrients when exposed to higher levels of carbon dioxide, thanks to experiments that artificially increased CO2 concentrations in agricultural fields. While plants grew bigger, they also had lower concentrations of minerals like iron and zinc.
Large and regular seasonal price fluctuations in local grain markets appear to offer African farmers substantial inter-temporal arbitrage opportunities, but these opportunities remain largely unexploited: small-scale farmers are commonly observed to "sell low and buy high" rather than the reverse. In a field experiment in Kenya, we show that credit market imperfections limit farmers' abilities to move grain inter-temporally. Providing timely access to credit allows farmers to buy at lower prices and sell at higher prices, increasing farm revenues and generating a return on investment of 28%. To understand general equilibrium effects of these changes in behavior, we vary the density of loan offers across locations. We document significant effects of the credit intervention on seasonal price fluctuations in local grain markets, and show that these GE effects shape individual level profitability estimates. In contrast to existing experimental work, the results indicate a setting in which microcredit can improve firm profitability, and suggest that GE effects can substantially shape microcredit's effectiveness. In particular, failure to consider these GE effects could lead to underestimates of the social welfare benefits of microcredit interventions.
Pamela Ronald was a Visiting Professor at the Center on Food Security and the Environment in 2018 and remains an FSE affiliate. She is also a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at UC Davis and serves as Director of Grass Genetics at the Joint Bioenergy Institute in Emeryville, California and Faculty Director of the UC Davis Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy.
Ronald’s laboratory studies the genetic basis of resistance to disease and tolerance to stress in rice. Together with her collaborators, she has engineered rice for resistance to disease and tolerance to flooding, which seriously threaten rice crops in Asia and Africa. For example, Ronald and collaborators discovered the rice XA21 immune receptor and the rice Sub1A submergence tolerance transcription factor. In 2015, five million farmers planted Sub1 rice varieties developed by breeders at the International Rice Research Institute. In 1996, she established the Genetic Resources Recognition Fund, a mechanism to recognize intellectual property contributions from less developed countries.
Please join us for a special screening of 'FOOD EVOLUTION' with a panel discussion where the film's director Scott Hamilton Kennedy and Stanford experts in the field of food security will discuss what "GMO" and "organic" mean for the health of your family and the environment. Pamela Ronald, coauthor of the book Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics and the Future of Food which helped inspire the movie will also be hosting a book signing during the reception following the event.
Amidst a brutally polarized debate marked by passion, suspicion and confusion, FOOD EVOLUTION, by Academy Award®-nominated director Scott Hamilton Kennedy (The Garden, Fame High, OT: Our Town), explores the controversy surrounding GMOs and food. Traveling from Hawaiian papaya groves, to banana farms in Uganda to the cornfields of Iowa, the film, narrated by esteemed science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson, wrestles with the emotions and the science driving one of the most heated arguments of our time.
In the GMO debate, both pro and anti camps claim science is on their side. Who’s right? FOOD EVOLUTION shows how easily misinformation, confusion and fear can overwhelm objective analysis. How do we ensure that our food supply is safe, and that everyone has enough to eat? How do we feed the world while also protecting the planet? Has genetic engineering increased or decreased pesticide use? Are GMO foods bad for your health? And, most importantly, what data, evidence and sources are we using to approach these important questions?
While the passionate advocates in the film are all concerned with the stewardship of safe, nutritious food for the planet, their differing views over what constitutes the truth have pit them against each other, rendering the very subject of food itself into an ideological battleground.
Enlisting experts such as Mark Lynas, Michael Pollan, Alison Van Eenennaam, Jeffrey Smith, Andrew Kimbrell, Vandana Shiva, Robert Fraley, Marion Nestle and Bill Nye, as well as farmers and scientists from around the world, this bold and necessary documentary separates the hype and emotion from the science and data to unravel the debate around food, and help audiences reach their own conclusions. In a debate in which all sides claim to be on the side of science, FOOD EVOLUTION brings a fresh perspective to one of the most critical issues facing global society today.
PANEL
Scott Hamilton Kennedy, FOOD EVOLUTION Director/Academy Award® nominee, writer, director, producer, cameraman, and editor
Ertharin Cousin, Payne Distinguished Lecturer, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies/Visiting Fellow, Center on Food Security and the Environment/Distinguished Fellow of Global Agriculture, Chicago Council on Global Affairs/Former Executive Director, World Food Programme
Pamela Ronald, Visiting Professor, Center on Food Security and the Environment/Distinguished Professor, Plant Pathology and the Genome Center, UC Davis/ Director, UC Davis Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy/co-author “Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics and the Future of Food"
MODERATOR
Rosamond Naylor, Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment, William Wrigley Professor of Earth System Science, Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Crop yields in smallholder systems are traditionally assessed using farmer-reported information in surveys, occasionally by crop cuts for a sub-section of a farmer's plot, and rarely using full-plot harvests. Accuracy and cost vary dramatically across methods. In parallel, satellite data is improving in terms of spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution needed to discern performance on smallholder plots. This study uses data from a survey experiment in Uganda, and evaluates the accuracy of Sentinel-2 imagery-based, remotely-sensed plot-level maize yields with respect to ground-based measures relying on farmer self-reporting, sub-plot crop cutting (CC), and full-plot crop cutting (FP). Remotely-sensed yields include two versions calibrated to FP and CC yields (calibrated), and an alternative based on crop model simulations, using no ground data (uncalibrated). On the ground, self-reported yields explained less than 1 percent of FP (and CC) yield variability, and while the average difference between CC and FP yields was not significant, CC yields captured one-quarter of FP yield variability. With satellite data, both calibrated and uncalibrated yields captured FP yield variability on pure stand plots similarly well, and both captured half of FP yield variability on pure stand plots above 0.10 hectare. The uncalibrated yields were consistently 1 ton per hectare higher than FP or CC yields, and the satellite-based yields were less well correlated with the ground-based measures on intercropped plots compared with pure stand ones. Importantly, regressions using CC, FP and remotely-sensed yields as dependent variables all produced very similar coefficients for yield response to production factors.
This is an excerpt. You can read the whole article in National Geographic here.
A 2016 McKinsey & Company study found that nearly three-quarters of Chinese customers worry that the food they eat is harmful to their health. The vast number of small farms makes China’s food system “almost completely unmanageable in terms of food safety,” says Scott Rozelle, an expert on rural China at Stanford University.
