Join us for a talk with agricultural and development economist Christopher B. Barrett, this quarter’s visiting scholar with the Center on Food Security and the Environment. Barrett is the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management and an International Professor of Agriculture with Cornell’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.
Professor Barrett will discuss food systems advances over the past 50 years that have promoted unprecedented reduction globally in poverty and hunger, averted considerable deforestation, and broadly improved lives, livelihoods and environments in much of the world. He’ll share perspectives on the reasons why, despite those advances, those systems increasingly fail large communities in environmental, health, and increasingly in economic terms and appear ill-suited to cope with inevitable further changes in climate, incomes, and population over the coming 50 years. Barrett will explore the new generation of innovations underway that must overcome a host of scientific and socioeconomic obstacles.
Also a Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics, Barrett is co-editor in chief of the journal Food Policy, is a faculty fellow with David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future and serves as the director of the Stimulating Agriculture and Rural Transformation (StART) Initiative housed at the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development.
On April 16, Solomon Hsiang, the Chancellor's Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Center's Noosheen Hashemi Visiting Scholar, will lead a discussion on data for adaption to climate change, moderated by Marshall Burke. A reception will be held from 4:30 - 5:00 pm. The main event begins at 5:00 pm.
About the speaker:
Solomon Hsiang combines data with mathematical models to understand how society and the environment influence one another. In particular, he focuses on how policy can encourage economic development while managing the global climate. His research has been published in Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Hsiang earned a BS in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science and a BS in Urban Studies and Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he received a PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University. He was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Applied Econometrics at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at Princeton University. Hsiang is currently the Chancellor's Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley and a Research Associate at the NBER.
“I learned long ago to never predict anything about North Korea.”
So began the keynote address by Anna Fifield, veteran journalist and winner of the 2018 Shorenstein Journalism Award. Speaking at the Award’s seventeenth annual panel discussion “How North Korea Is, and Isn’t, Changing under Kim Jong Un,” Fifield, the Beijing bureau chief for The Washington Post , shared some of the many observations she has made since she first began covering North Korea in 2004.
Two other North Korea experts joined Fifield at the panel: Barbara Demick, New York correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, formerly head of the bureaus in Beijing and Seoul, and the 2012 Shorenstein award winner; and Andray Abrahamian, the 2018-2019 Koret Fellow, whose previous role as executive director of Choson Exchange and other projects took him to the DPRK nearly 30 times. Yong Suk Lee, deputy director of the Korea Program at Shorenstein APARC, chaired the panel.
The presence of another person—the Dear Respected Comrade himself—was also very much felt in the room, if only in spirit.
Barbara Demick (center) speaks at 2018 Shorenstein Journalism Award.
Survival at any cost
At various points throughout its 70-year history, experts have predicted the demise of the "Hermit Kingdom." Fifield herself admitted to occasionally thinking along such terms.
And yet the country continues to prove them wrong.
“[D]uring my first stint covering North Korea, [I] just couldn’t envisage any way that this regime could survive the death of the second-generation leader and the transition to a third generation,” she said. “Kim Il Sung had created a myth of revolutionary heroism around himself, and a myth of divine selection around his son, Kim Jong Il. How could the North Korean people, who no longer live in a Hermit Kingdom, tolerate a third leader called Kim, let alone one who had no highly exaggerated or plain fictional back story?”
“Yet," Fifield continued, "here we are. Next month, Kim Jong Un will celebrate seven years in charge of North Korea.”
One prominent reason for the nation's recent survival, and an idea put forward by Fifield and supported by her co-panelists, was the development of markets in the communist state.
For decades, North Korea operated under the centrally-planned communist model. Even as China pursued reform and as the Soviet Union collapsed, the North Korean state maintained its central position in the economy.
However, following the famines of the 1990s, the state had no choice but to allow market activity to develop. Under the third Kim markets have continued to grow.
“There are now more than 400 established, state-sanctioned markets in North Korea,” said Fifield. “That’s more than double the number that existed when Kim Jong Un took over at the end of 2011.”
A side effect of this nascent market economy has been the emergence of new elites in the purported “classless” society. Fifield described the development of a capital within the capital—“Pyonghattan”—where newfound elites purchase clothes from western retailers and undergo plastic surgery for their eyelids.
Abrahamian concurred, noting that Kim Jong Un made sure to coddle this upper middle and upper class in Pyongyang. "The old way of doing that under Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung, was very much through a loyalty and gift economy," Abrahamian said. "Money was not necessary in the old North Korea. Now it is. You do need it to get your daily necessities, and if you’re lucky enough, the products [from the “outside world”] help you to have a more pleasurable life through the market.”
At the other end of the spectrum, North Koreans turn to the markets not out of entrepreneurial zeal, but out of a need to survive. As an example, Fifield described meeting a mother and daughter living near the border with China. The mother took her daughter out of school in order to raise pigs and make tofu. Before dawn, they trekked into the mountains to tend crops of corn. It was a back-breaking existence. "If they were lucky, they made enough money each day to buy food for themselves," Fifield said. "Many days, they did all this to break even."
Andray Abrahamian responds to a question from the audience.
A smart tyrant not to be underestimated
The panel continued to focus on the man currently at the helm in North Korea.
“When I returned for my second go at covering the Koreas, I wanted to figure out how he’d done it," said Fifield. "How had this podgy young upstart with no qualifications other than being born into this family managed to take control of this regime…? How had he managed to keep intact this anachronistic system that should have died years, even decades, before?”
Fifield emphasized that her comments did not equate to admiration for Kim Jong Un. “He’s a tyrant,” she reminded the room. “But he’s a smart tyrant who’s been operating in a calculating way. To treat him as a joke or a madman is to underestimate the threat of him.”
“Kim Jong Un has not allowed these markets to flourish because he cares about the people and their wellbeing,” Fifield continued. “He has demonstrated time and time again that he doesn’t care at all about the people.”
“There’s only one thing he cares about and that is staying in power.”
Demick cautioned further against over-estimating the positive impact of market development on life in North Korea. “The people Anna interviewed for her groundbreaking series in 2017 in The Washington Post were disgusted with the system,” said Demick. “With the income inequality, with the corruption, with the controls.”
“For them, what’s the worst thing about North Korea? Simply being born there.”
The panelists participated in a lively audience Q & A.
A celebration of journalism
The Shorenstein Journalism Award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000, recognizes accomplished journalists committed to critical reporting on and exploring the complexities of Asia through their writing. It alternates between honoring recipients from the West, who mainly address American audiences, and recipients from Asia, who pave the way for freedom of the press in their countries. Established in 2002, the award honors the legacy of APARC benefactor Mr. Walter H. Shorenstein. A visionary businessman, philanthropist, and champion of Asian-American relations, Shorenstein was dedicated to promoting excellence in journalism and a deeper understanding of Asia.
While the reporting of each year's recipient focuses on different regions and areas of interest, the award consistently recognizes quality journalism. In his welcome remarks, panel chair Yong Suk Lee stated, “In the face of current attacks on journalists and on the truth in the United States and the world, [Shorenstein APARC is] even more committed to excellence in journalism, and to defending independent and free media."
Fifield’s co-panelists spoke at length about how deserving she was of the award. Before their first meeting in Seoul, Abrahamian confessed to harboring skepticism about Fifield. “I had read some of her work before and knew she had analytical chops, but thought to myself that journalists are always fighting for the next scoop.” However, after talking to Fifield for only a few minutes, Abrahamian readily dropped his guard. “I told myself, 'This is a special journalist; she's got something.’"
A previous recipient of the Shorenstein Journalism Award herself, Demick was equally enthusiastic in her praise of Fifield. “For the last four years, [Anna] had owned the North Korea story like no other journalist I’ve met, including myself.”
Fifield was presented with the Shorenstein award and prize at a private evening ceremony.
Watch Fifield’s keynote speech below. An audio version is availalbe on our SoundCloud channel.
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Panel chair Yong Suk Lee (left) listens as 2018 Shorenstein Journalism Award winner Anna Fifield speaks to audience.
Renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs launched an ambitious — some would say audacious — experiment back in 2005 in his quest to prove that we can end global poverty if we take a holistic, community-led approach to sustainable development.
The Millennium Villages Project targeted more than a dozen sub-Saharan villages and imposed an integrated approach to help these villages achieve the U.N. Millennium Development Goals to address poverty, health, gender equality, and disease.
Funded by World Bank loans, governments, and private contributions, the pilot wanted to see whether conditions would improve dramatically for the half-million residents of the villages in the 10 project sites by improving access to safe drinking water, primary education, basic health care, and other science-based interventions such as better seeds and fertilizer.
The results are in. And boy are they are mixed.
Some harsh critics say the MVP was a waste of hundreds of millions of dollars, the project was riddled with fundamental methodological errors, and there is little scientific evidence that the project attained its goals.
Others, such as Sachs himself in this Lancet Global Health perspective, say that while the outcomes on poverty were mixed and impacts on nutrition and education often inconclusive, “the lessons learned from the MVP are highly pertinent.”
Stanford Health Policy’s Eran Bendavid — asked to contribute a commentary about the endline evaluation of the project published online this month in The Lancet Global Health — falls somewhere between critic and advocate.
"The project, set up as a focused set of interventions implementing an important idea in international development about how to best help the poor, was a terrific opportunity for learning about how to reduce poverty and improve well-being,” Bendavid said.
But the MVP was not set up as a randomized field trial, nor was there any monitoring of what happened in any comparison areas to make sense of what the intervention had achieved.
“No comparison sites were selected either. That was a wasted opportunity,” he said. “The endline evaluation of the project does the best that can be done to eek some information from the limited opportunities for learning.”
Bendavid, an associate professor of medicine and an infectious diseases physician who focuses on global health, said the project invested about $120 per person per year for 50,000 people for 10 years. That’s about $600 million.
“The clearest evidence of benefits from this investment is improved maternal health-care and health outcomes,” he said.
The authors of the final evaluation tried to put a better spin on the net benefits.
“In particular, substantial effects were seen in agriculture and health, in which some of the outcomes were roughly one (standard deviation) better in the project villages than in the comparison villages,” they wrote. However, they added, “The project was estimated to have no significant impact on the consumption-based measures of poverty,” and impacts on nutrition and education outcomes were often inconclusive.
But when they averaged outcomes within categories, the authors — of whom Sachs was one — concluded that the project had significant favorable impacts on agriculture, nutrition, education, child health, maternal health, HIV and malaria, and water and sanitation.
In all, a third of the targets of the Millennium Development Goals were met in the project sites.
Bendavid concluded that the endline evaluation “marks an important chapter in our understanding of Africa’s meandering path towards health and economic development.”
He noted that the project’s evaluation, which was done as well as possible given the difficulties of assessing its impact 10 years on, still failed to shed much light on the MVP’s approach as a method to bring an end to poverty.
“This was such an important project,” Bendavid said. “We’ll never fully know where it succeeded and where it did not, but this evaluation is a welcome bookend to what we are likely to ever learn from that experience.”
Jeffrey Sachs, special advisor to UN Secretary General on the Millennium Development Goals, delivers a speech at a UN Economic and Social Council meeting in New York City. Sachs is attempting to implement a plan to meet the Millennium Development Goals which would lift hundreds of millions out of poverty and save tens of millions of lives.
Food security experts identify government support, policy implementation, private sector engagement and investment in smallholder farmers as keys to Africa’s agricultural future.
Food security experts from the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) gathered to discuss transforming food production in Africa at Stanford on Nov. 29. The symposium, hosted by the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) examined the challenges, strategies, and possible solutions for catalyzing and sustaining an inclusive agriculture transformation in Africa.
Moderator Ertharin Cousin, FSE visiting fellow and previous World Food Programme director with more than 25 years of experience on hunger, food, and resilience strategies, launched the panel by outlining Africa’s plight. “Today some 100 million of the farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa farm less than 2 hectares of land. Some 80 percent of those living in rural areas are poor. More than 30 percent of the rural population is chronically hungry and 35 percent of the under-five-year-olds are stunted. By 2050, the bulk of the world's population growth will take place on the continent. In fact, some project that 1.3 billion will be added to the continent, and Nigeria’s [population] will grow larger than the size of the United States between now and 2050,” Cousin said
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While Africa continues to experience the highest occurrence of food insecurity worldwide, the continent also contains over 60 percent of the worlds uncultivated but fertile land. AGRA formed in 2006 to fulfill the vision that Africa can feed itself and the world. Panelists included Agnes Kalibata, AGRA President and former Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources of Rwanda; Kanayo F. Nwanze, AGRA board member and immediate past president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development; Usha Barwale Zehr, AGRA board member and Director and Chief Technology Officer of Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company Private Limited; and Rajiv Shah, AGRA board member, Rockefeller Foundation President and former Administer of USAID.
Kanayo F. Nwanze stressed the importance of agricultural transformation for Africa’s future. “No country in the world ever transformed itself without going through an agrarian change. No country. Europe, 17th; Japan, 18th century; 19th century was the US, your country; China, 20th century. Why should they be different from Africa? So, first and foremost, we have to have total agricultural transformation,” Nwanze said.
AGRA president, Agnes Kalibata, also spoke to the need for policy implementation and government support in helping drive change. “AGRA as an institution can only do so much. But these governments have the potential and the capacity to reach every corner of their countries. The problem is they are challenged by capacity to do that, by capacity to design proper programs, and by capacity to implement these programs,” Kalibata said.
Expanding on governments' ability to impact and drive change, Usha Barwale Zehr highlighted Asia’s success, specifically with strategic partnerships. “…we've done a lot of talking about public/private partnership. Not so much on the ground on implementing it in a manner, which happened in Asia, for instance, where there was policy, and, most importantly, government will. The government was willing to do whatever it took to make sure that agriculture was transformed at the end of it,” Zehr said.
Beyond government and policy support the panelists also addressed the need for innovation and access to seed technologies. “Why is it that the African farmer and the Indian farmer should not have access to what the American farmer has access to today and reaps benefit from it? …So it's the hybrids, the varieties, the GM technology. Tomorrow it'll be the gene-edited products. And after that we will talk about the satellite-based imaging data that we will use for developing drought-tolerant crops for that very, very small micro environment that existed in the one district in Nigeria,” Zehr said.
"By 2050, who is going to feed Africa? … It's the youth of today. But they're not going to be using the same technologies that exist today. Just think of what IT can do, aggregation, organization of farmer's groups. So, the elements are there. I see the agriculture of tomorrow meeting the challenge – for Africa meeting that challenge is Africa being at the forefront of feeding the world. Africa has to be able to feed itself first. And we have all the opportunities there,” Nwanze said.
This is the first installment of the Global Food Security Symposium series hosted by Stanford University's Center on Food Security and the Environment and generously supported by Zach Nelson and Elizabeth Horn. FSE is a joint initiative of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
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Panel members at the Global Food Security Symposium, Nov. 29 2017.
Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment launches new symposium series focused on global food security with panel exploring Africa’s agricultural potential.
Organized by the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), the Nov. 29 symposium is the first in the center’s new Global Food Security Symposium series. Panel members include visiting AGRA board members, who will examine the challenges, strategies, and possible solutions for catalyzing and sustaining an inclusive agriculture transformation in Africa. This symposium marks the third series established by FSE convening thought leaders addressing global food security issues.
Afflicted by conflict, political upheaval, and extreme weather patterns Africa continues to experience the highest occurrence of food insecurity. However, with over 60 percent of the worlds uncultivated but fertile land, there is significant room for improvement. AGRA formed in 2006 to fulfill the vision that Africa can feed itself and the world. As an alliance led by Africans with roots in farming communities across the continent, they work to understand the unique needs of farmers and offer sustainable solutions designed to boost production.
In a region with 27.4 percent of the population currently experiencing food insecurity, creating a sustainable agricultural revolution remains a key solution to improving food security across the area. Moderated by Ertharin Cousin, previous World Food Programme director, with 25 years of experience on hunger, food, and resilience strategies, the panel will explore how an agricultural transformation in Africa can sustain a growing population, relieve hunger, generate jobs, improve social cohesion, and create global exports.
Panel members include: Ertharin Cousin (moderator), Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Visiting Fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment, former US Ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Agriculture in Rome.
Agnes Kalibata, the President of AGRA and former Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources of Rwanda.
Kanayo F. Nwanze, the immediate past president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), winner of the Africa Food Prize in 2016, AGRA board member.
Rajiv Shah, Rockefeller Foundation President, former Administer of USAID (2010-15) where he led bipartisan reform and expansion of US efforts combating global food insecurity. During his previous work at the Gates Foundation he helped launched AGRA.
Usha Barwale Zehr, Director and Chief Technology Officer at Maharashtra – one of India’s largest and most successful multinational seed companies – and AGRA board member.
This is the first installment of the Global Food Security Symposium series hosted by Stanford University's Center on Food Security and the Environment and generously supported by Zach Nelson and Elizabeth Horn. FSE is a joint initiative of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Graduate School of Business
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saumitra@stanford.edu
Associate Professor of Political Economy, GSB
Associate Professor, by courtesy, of Economics and of Political Science
saumitra_jha.jpg
Along with being a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Saumitra Jha is an associate professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and convenes the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab.
Jha’s research has been published in leading journals in economics and political science, including Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Development Economics, and he serves on a number of editorial boards. His research on ethnic tolerance has been recognized with the Michael Wallerstein Award for best published article in Political Economy from the American Political Science Association in 2014 and his co-authored research on heroes with the Oliver Williamson Award for best paper by the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics in 2020. Jha was honored to receive the Teacher of the Year Award, voted by the students of the Stanford MSx Program in 2020.
Saum holds a BA from Williams College, master’s degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. Prior to rejoining Stanford as a faculty member, he was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University. He has been a fellow of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University, and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Jha has consulted on economic and political risk issues for the United Nations/WTO, the World Bank, government agencies, and for private firms.
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Dan C. Chung Faculty Scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
