Sugar and ethanol production are key components of Brazil's rural development and energy strategies, yet in recent years sugar production has been widely criticized for its environmental and labor practices. This study examines the relationship between rural development and sugarcane, ethanol, and cattle production in the state of São Paulo. Our results suggest that the value added components of sugarcane production, which include sugar refining and ethanol production, may have a strong positive affect on local human development in comparison to primary agricultural production activities and other land uses. These results imply that sugar production, when accompanied by a local processing industry can stimulate rural development. However, this paper also highlights the significant environmental and social harms generated by the sugar industry at large, which may undermine its development benefits if not addressed.

This paper serves as background to the fourth presentation in a Symposium Series on Global Food Policy and Food Security hosted by the Center on Food Security and Environment at Stanford University and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Political dynamics, not economic analysis, drive the domestic policy response to sharply rising food prices. The political objective during a food price crisis is almost always to keep it from happening. In the short run, this means “stabilizing” domestic food prices despite whatever is happening in world markets. Stabilizing domestic food prices in the face of sharply escalating world prices is not a foolish goal—most countries try to do it. The real issue is whether this can be done effectively and efficiently. The answer is always “no” unless the country has planned well ahead for such a contingency and already has an operational food price stabilization program in place. 

As a matter of “good practice,” all countries are discouraged by international donors from conducting such programs. Instead, countries are urged to implement “social” safety nets in times of food price spikes. The economic rationale is clear: let market prices signal the scarcity of food resources so that supply and demand can adjust, and then compensate the poor for deterioration in their standard of living when food prices rise. The problem is that safety nets that reach the poor quickly and effectively take considerable time to design and implement, and are quite costly in fiscal terms if the poor are a substantial share of the total population. Historically, unless the country is already running a cash transfer program to the poor, the emergence of a food price crisis is too sudden for an effective government response. Gearing up emergency food relief safety nets is not an effective response to a sudden spike in food prices.

More active measures to prevent food price spikes are needed, both domestically and internationally. One starting point would be for countries with large populations to gradually build their grain reserves to the point where they do not feel vulnerable to spikes in world prices and to possible grain embargoes from their regular suppliers. It would be desirable to have such stockholding strategies coordinated internationally, but this is unlikely in other than rhetorical terms. Still, the mere existence of these stocks, even if domestically controlled, would have a calming influence on world grain markets (especially on the very thin world rice market). With calmer markets, recourse to more open trade policies becomes politically feasible (and it is almost always economically desirable). Eventually, the reality of the high costs of grain storage will stimulate a more balanced approach to food security, with both reserves and trade playing significant roles.

Knowledge systems—networks of linked actors, organizations, and objects that perform a number of knowledge-related functions that link knowledge and know how with action—have played a key role in fostering agricultural development over the last 50 years. We examine the evolution of the knowledge system of the Yaqui Valley, Mexico, a region often described as the home of the green revolution for wheat, tracing changes in the functions of critical knowledge system participants, information flows, and research priorities. Most of the knowledge system's key players have been in place for many decades, although their roles have changed in response to exogenous and endogenous shocks and trends (e.g., drought, policy shifts, and price trends). The system has been agile and able to respond to challenges, in part because of the diversity of players (evolving roles of actors spanning research–decision maker boundaries) and also because of the strong and consistent role of innovative farmers. Although the agricultural research agenda in the Valley is primarily controlled from within the agricultural sector, outside voices have become an important influence in broadening development- and production-oriented perspectives to sustainability perspectives.

One way of understanding how climate change is likely to affect global food production and food security is to better understand the recent past. That is, how have changes al-ready influenced agricultural activities and production? For example, considerable debate has taken place on whether future impacts in agriculture will be driven mainly by rising temperatures, or if instead precipitation changes are the main concern. The answer to this would influence strategies to adapt, such as investing in heat tolerance versus waiting for better rainfall projections. To inform questions such as these, we analyzed historical weather and crop data throughout the world over the past 30 years. From this anal-ysis, we draw several conclusions that are relevant to policy makers.

Efforts to anticipate how climate change will affect future food availability can benefit from understanding the impacts of changes to date. Here we show that in the cropping regions and growing seasons of most countries, with the important exception of the United States, temperature trends for 1980-2008 exceeded one standard deviation of historic year-to-year variability. Models that link yields of the four largest commodity crops to weather indicate that global maize and wheat production declined by 3.8% and 5.5%, respectively, compared to a counter-factual without climate trends. For soybeans and rice, winners and losers largely balanced out. Climate trends were large enough in some countries to offset a significant portion of the increases in average yields 16 that arose from technology, CO2 fertilization, and other factors.

This paper was prepared for Stanford University’s Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series, hosted by the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is home to two-thirds of the world’s ultra-poor today. This paper offers current thinking on the structural causes of the spatially concentrated, persistent ultra-poverty that has plagued Africa for a generation and some key entry points for facilitating Africans’ escape from persistent ultra-poverty.

The increased recognition of persistent ultra-poverty has rekindled long-dormant interest in poverty traps. The essence of a poverty trap is that there exists one or more low equilibrium level(s) of well-being in which people appear caught unnecessarily. Small adjustments fail to move people out of those equilibria sustainably. Rather, systems must change, major positive shocks must occur, or both. And in the absence of systemic change, recurring adverse shocks only drive more people into the trap.

The ultra-poverty trap that characterizes much of rural SSA today is intimately caught up with (i) the bidirectional interrelationship among hunger, ill-health, low productivity, weak institutions and natural resources degradation, all of which become manifest in low incomes, (ii) poor initial conditions associated with health and nutrition, especially early in childhood, but also with the state of infrastructure and the natural resource base on which rural livelihood disproportionately depend, and (iii) uninsured risk exposure, which is especially severe in rural areas and in agriculture. The closely coupled nature of these problems adds substantially to the challenge of addressing any one of them on its own and thereby makes integrated strategies essential. 

The available theory and evidence suggests that the policy focus must fall squarely on stimulating a smallholder food productivity revolution. Toward that end, the paper concludes by identifying and explaining key entry points for assisting the escape from persistent ultra-poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.

1. Build and protect the productive asset endowments of the ultra-poor
2. Improve the productivity of the ultra-poor’s current asset holdings
3. Improve risk management options for the ultra-poor
4. Facilitate favorable transitions out of agriculture

Although the topic of persistent ultra-poverty would seem to lend itself to a pessimistic ending, the future for Africa is actually rather hopeful. The East Asian experience demonstrates that mass, rapid escape from persistent ultra-poverty is feasible. Real agricultural output growth rates are accelerating in SSA, nearly doubling from the 1980s rate so that per capita food output is growing again, helping reduce rural poverty rates in countries enjoying increased agricultural productivity. Finally, the  policymaking and donor communities are now appropriately focusing on how best to stimulate investment incentives, productivity growth, risk management and productive transitions out of agriculture. These broad foci are appropriate and reasonably well-grounded in both theory and empirical evidence.  

The challenges of reducing global hunger and poverty are different today than they were 30 years ago. Current challenges include price volatility associated with increased integration of food, energy, and finance markets; the steady progression of climate change; poorly defined land institutions; and a failure to break vicious cycles of malnutrition and infectious disease. Farmland speculation is occurring globally—often at odds with rural poverty alleviation—and food insecurity remains a pressing issue with the estimated number of chronically malnourished people hovering around one billion. Given these patterns, food and agriculture are becoming increasingly ingrained in international security and policy discussions. This paper explores several ways in which the traditional field of agricultural development needs to expand to address the broader issues of international security and human welfare. It focuses on five key interrelated issues: the macroeconomic and energy contexts of agricultural development; climate change; deforestation, land access, and land markets; farming systems and technology for the ultra-poor; and food-health linkages with a specific focus on infectious disease. Recommendations for investments in capacity building, revised curricula, and development projects are made on the basis of evidence presented for each issue. It is clear that academic programs, government agencies, development and aid organizations, and foundations need to dismantle the walls between disciplinary and programmatic fields, and to find new, innovative ways to reach real-world solutions.