Northeast Asia is a global center of economic dynamism, propelled by phenomenal growth in social and cultural interactions among the region's nations. Still, wounds from past wrongs, committed during times of colonialism and war, have not yet fully healed, and the question of history has become a highly contentious diplomatic issue. After one and a half years in office, the leaders of China and South Korea (Korea hereafter) still refuse to hold bilateral summits with their Japanese counterpart, largely due to disputes over the past. Questions about history touch on the most sensitive issues of national identity, making it very difficult for countries to compromise.

How should we understand and approach current historical tensions in Northeast Asia? Pessimists worry that the legacies of the past will persist and that there is not much we can do about it. Optimists believe that these issues will inevitably fade over time as the wartime generation passes away and the countries of the region become increasingly integrated economically and culturally.

Last summer, I had an opportunity to deliver a special lecture series at a Korean university. More than 30 students from China, Japan, Korea, the U.S. and Europe attended the lectures, which focused on problems related to the modern history of Northeast Asia and territorial disputes. I asked students whether they thought Japan had apologized for its past actions of aggression. Korean and Chinese students mostly replied that Japan had either "not apologized at all" or was "not sincere." In contrast, most Japanese students were hardly aware of the misfortunes of the past and the controversies about the government's stance.

The historical amnesia of Japanese students is most worrisome, but the insistence by Chinese and Korean students that the Japanese have not apologized at all is troubling, too. Although the definition of "apology" may vary depending on circumstances, it is undeniable that Japanese leaders, including prime ministers, have directly expressed regret about Japan's actions of aggression to Koreans and Chinese. Of course, legitimate doubts arise in Korea and China as to Japan's sincerity. More than once, a prime minister's apology has been undercut by the denial of wartime responsibility by his education minister, or by a subsequent visit by the prime minister to the Yasukuni Shrine to Japan's war dead.

My teaching experience illustrates the danger posed by a crucial gap in perceptions. History does not merely narrate events or developments. In reconstructing the past, it is inevitable that certain parts are omitted or stressed, producing different views. Divided historical memories separate nations, resulting in distinct, often contradictory, perceptions. Those perceptions become deeply embedded in the public consciousness, transmitted to succeeding generations formally by education and informally through the arts, popular culture and mass media.

Time isn't a cure-all

Why have these nations developed distinct, and incomplete, memories of the wartime period?

One common answer is that Japan was an aggressor while China and Korea were victims, but this is too simplistic to explain the complexities of modern history and collective memory in Northeast Asia. Different events acquire disproportionate weight in the formation of each nation's historical consciousness. For China and Korea, Japanese acts of aggression -- such as the Nanjing Massacre or forced labor and sexual slavery -- constitute the most crucial elements. For Japan, events related to U.S. actions, such as the firebombings of Japanese cities or the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are more important. Korea and China are a less significant element in Japan's memory, while Japan looms large in theirs.

Japan's focus on U.S. actions, over the sufferings of Koreans and Chinese, explains the country's historical amnesia and reluctance to come to terms with its Asian neighbors. Unlike Germany, postwar Japan developed a mythology of victimhood, shaped by the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the massive incendiary and atomic bombings of its cities. Victim consciousness provided fertile soil for the growth of postwar neo-nationalism that justified colonialism and war and denied Japan's responsibility for atrocities.

Balanced historical memory with a better understanding of the perspective of the other side is urgently needed. Japan needs to clearly comprehend the mindset of its neighbors, instead of complaining about its "apology fatigue." China and Korea are also responsible for educating their citizens about Japan's own struggle to come to terms with its past. That kind of mutual understanding rests on resuming efforts at joint historical study with a commitment to open-minded debate. Only then can the nations of Northeast Asia begin to narrow perception gaps and forge a shared view.

This is a task not only for governments but for civil society. We should encourage exchanges among young people from the three countries, including joint visits to historic sites such as the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Seodaemun Prison History Museum in Seoul. Such gatherings would constitute a regionwide attempt to share and heal the pains of the past. Disregarding or ignoring dark events means not only evading historical accountability but also missing the opportunity to learn from history. Germany's failure to learn from its defeat in World War I led to the rise of Nazism and another world war. The German experience should provide a valuable lesson for all, especially Japan.

We cannot depend on time alone to heal these wounds. When issues of the past posed a stumbling block in improving relations between China and Japan in the 1970s, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping said, "Because our generation is not wise enough to resolve all of the pending questions, let's leave the unsettled ones to the next generation." Contrary to his expectations, however, the two countries are stricken today with a worse situation involving history and territorial disputes, and the younger generation tends to be even more swayed by the fever of nationalism.

This is a moment of both danger and opportunity for Northeast Asia. The current impasse in regional relations demands a commitment to confronting the corrosive nationalism fed by the unresolved issues of history. As the wartime generation passes from the scene, they are called upon to leave behind a wiser generation capable of realizing the potential of Northeast Asia to be the center of the 21st century.

This article was originally carried by Nikkei Asian Review on 25 July and reposted with permission.

Human Capital & Ageing

as part of the "Next World Program"

Harvard School of Public Health

Boston, Massachusetts

April 13-14, 2015

Organized by:

David E. Bloom, Harvard School of Public Health, USA; David Canning, Harvard School of Public Health, USA; Karen Eggleston, Stanford University, USA; Wang Feng, Fudan University, China; Hans Groth, World Demographic & Ageing Forum, Switzerland; Alfonso Sousa-Poza, University of Hohenheim, Germany; Thomas Zeltner, Special Envoy, World Health Organization, Switzerland.

Topic

One of the challenges faced by ageing societies is maintaining a workforce large enough to supply the goods and services needed by a country's entire population. In the coming decades, industrialized countries will experience a steep increase in the share of elderly persons in the population and a fall in the share of the working-age population. In some countries, the number of people aged 60-64 (many of whom are about to retire) already exceeds the number of people aged 15-19 (the cohort soon entering the labour market). There will, however, be mitigating factors that will tend to decrease the effects of declines in the working-age share of the population: (a) the burden of caring for a high number of elderly people will be offset by there being fewer children to support, and (b) the proportion of adult women who work will rise when there are fewer children to take care of. Still, if there is no change in work and retirement patterns, the ratio of older inactive persons per worker will almost double from around 38 percent in the OECD area in 2000 to just over 70 percent in 2050 (OECD, "Live Longer, Work Longer", 2006). In Europe, this ratio could rise to almost one older inactive person for every worker over the same period.

Ageing on the anticipated scale will place substantial pressure on public finances and economic growth. According to the OECD, on the basis of unchanged participation patterns and productivity growth, the growth of GDP per capita in the OECD area would decline to around 1.7 percent per year over the next three decades, as compared with about 2.4 percent per year between 1970 and 2000. These negative consequences of ageing could be possibly offset by postponement of retirement, greater immigration, faster productivity growth, or higher fertility (although the positive economic effects of higher fertility would only come several decades after an uptick in fertility rates). While these developments would all help offset the negative effects, they need to go hand-in-hand with attempts to mobilize available labour in order to sustain economic growth. One of the most significant sources of additional labour supply is older people who are currently inactive. Indeed, as labour markets tighten, companies will soon have little choice but to be more welcoming of older employees. Prompt action to harness – and enhance – the contributions of older workers could become a key competitive advantage.

The objective of this workshop would be to discuss one important topic related to an ageing workforce, namely human capital. How does a worker’s human capital change over the life course and what role does the health and skill status of workers play? The answer to these questions is of great importance, not only for adequate human resource policies, but also for macroeconomic policies, especially those associated with retirement and economic growth. Despite the importance of this issue, this question is not easily answered.

The workshop will bring together researchers to present recent research on ageing and human capital. Research questions and topics that could be dealt with include:

• Human capital, economic growth, and the demographic dividend.
• Firm-level experience in promoting human capital among older workers.
• Evaluation of policies aimed at enhancing the quantity, quality, and value of older workers’ human capital.
• The relationship between human capital and productivity.
• Training and wages of older workers.
• Technological change, knowledge replenishment, and productivity. 

Submission for the Workshop

Interested authors are invited to submit a 1-page abstract by the 30th of September 2014 to David E. Bloom (dbloom@hsph.harvard.edu) and Alfonso Sousa-Poza (Alfonso.sousa-poza@uni-hohenheim.de). The authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by the end of October and completed draft papers will then be expected by the 28th of February 2015.

Economy class travel and accommodation costs for one author of each accepted paper will be covered by the organisers.

A selection of the papers presented at the workshop will (assuming successful completion of the review process) be published in a special issue of the Journal of the Economics of Ageing.

Submission for the Special Issue

Interested authors (also those not attending the workshop) are invited to submit papers for the special issue in the Journal of the Economics of Ageing by the 31st of May 2015. Submissions should be made online at http://ees.elsevier.com/jeoa. Please select article type “SI Human Capital.”

About the Next World Program

The Next World Program is a joint initiative of Harvard University’s Program on the Global Demography of Aging, the WDA Forum, Stanford University’s Asia Health Policy Program, and Fudan University’s Comparative Aging Societies. These institutions will organize an annual workshop and a special issue in the Journal of the Economics of Ageing on an important economic theme related to ageing societies.

MANILA, Philippines – When Victor Corpus was an idealistic young military officer, he turned on his country to join the communist New People’s Army. He headed for the mountains and would face years of armed struggle, imprisonment and then a sentence to death.

What made the highly trained Philippine Army first lieutenant lead a bold raid to capture the weapons from his own armory at the Philippine Military Academy – one that would go on to make him a living legend and lead to a movie about his life?

“It was my realization that our society at that time was structured like a pyramid, where the wealth of the nation is controlled by about 100 families on top, where less than 1 percent of the population controls everything,” recalls Corpus, who is now 70.

When the Army ordered the 26-year-old officer and his soldiers to train the private militia of a wealthy warlord in the northern Philippines, a trigger was pulled.

“If you are a member of the Armed Forces and you realize that you are just being used as an instrument of the elite, to preserve and protect their interests, it makes you want to rise up and fight for what you believe are the true interests of the people,” he said.

“That is what made me go to the rebel side.”

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It’s still a factor that makes young Filipino men and women pick up arms today: The gap between rich and poor, the government corruption, the dynasties that still rule the impoverished countryside.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks reinforced the U.S. commitment to build the capacity of the Philippine military to prevent their country from becoming a haven for extremists who might use the country to stage and plot another attack against United States’ interests.  

Felter helped the Philippine Army Special Operations Command (SOCOM) set up the country’s first counterterrorist unit. That elite Light Reaction Battalion has now been expanded to a regiment of 1,500 soldiers. Felter traveled to the Philippines in February to receive a medal in honor of his work in establishing this force.

His work with the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) as a military attaché, and dozens of trips back since, allowed him to get behind the scenes and make friends in the military and government. Those close relationships provided him unprecedented access to thousands of sensitive documents chronicling in micro-level detail the history of Philippine military and government efforts to combat insurgency and terrorism in the field.

“All counterinsurgency is local,” says Felter. “You need to study it at the local level to really understand it. And the Philippines is like a Petri dish for studying both insurgency and counterinsurgency because you have multiple, long-running insurgencies, each with distinct characteristics, and with an array of government and military responses to address these threats over time.”

Felter was in the Philippines in 2004 conducting field research as part of his Stanford Ph.D. dissertation when he was first able to gain access to what would become a trove of detailed incident-level data on insurgency and counterinsurgency in this conflict prone country. After bringing back the data and meeting with his faculty advisors – Stanford political science professors David Laitin and James Fearon – he realized the extensive incident-level data could be coded in a manner that would make it a tremendous resource for scholars studying civil wars, insurgencies and other forms of politically motivated violence.

“This comprehensive conflict dataset, when it becomes public later this year, is going to be the Holy Grail of  micro-level conflict data,” Felter says. “It promises to be an unprecedented resource for scholars and policy analysts studying the foundations and dynamics of conflict. It has the potential to drive a significant number of publications, reports and analyses, and enable conflict researchers to develop insights and test theories that they would not have been able to do before.”

They also hope to help journalists do a better job of analyzing conflict.

Jim Gomez, the AP’s chief correspondent in the Philippines, says there is little access to detailed data about the conflicts he has been covering for two decades.

“There is a natural contradiction between military, police, intelligence and other security agencies which, by nature, operate in secrecy,” says Gomez, who has been on the front lines of many battles in his homeland. “The database is one step toward satisfying the need of journalists to be able to write stories with more accurate and in-depth detail and context. It allows for better comparative analysis and can give insights to emerging patterns like those found in the southern Philippines. Better access to information, to my mind, is always a boon to better security policies.”

CISAC Senior Research Scholar Joe Felter awaits a pledge of honor by the Philippines Armed Forces.

Felter coordinated with senior leaders in the Armed Forces of the Philippines to gain approval to access and code the unclassified details from tens of thousands of individual conflict episodes reported by Philippine military units in the field dating back to 1975. Most of data were gleaned from the original hand-typed records maintained by the Philippine Army. Felter worked with contacts in the Philippine military to build a team of military and civilian coders to scan and input data from the only existing copies of these original incident reports.

In 2009 – while a National Security Affairs Fellow at the Hoover Institution prior to his final deployment in Afghanistan – Felter invited his colleague, Navy veteran Jake Shapiro, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, to join him as ESOC’s co-director. Shapiro and Felter were graduate school classmates and worked together at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center where the vision for ESOC was first articulated. Felter and Shapiro formally established the Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC) project and began to build comprehensive databases on multiple political conflict cases around the world.

Eli Berman, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, joined the team soon after. Today he is research director for international security studies at University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and professor of economics at UC San Diego.

“I'm fascinated by how economic development is best achieved in places where property and people are insecure. Unfortunately, that's true of many Philippines communities,” Berman said. “Joe is the perfect partner for that research. He brings insights that come from years of thoughtful experience and local knowledge. The team he has assembled and the data they bring are a joy to work with.”

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ESOC members also include David Laitin, James Fearon and Jeremy Weinstein, all from Stanford’s political science department, as well as affiliates and a growing cadre of current and former post-doctoral fellows.

The Empirical Studies of Conflict Project website was launched last year. It highlights some of the key initial findings from ongoing data collection efforts in the Philippines as well as Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Mexico, Pakistan and Vietnam. The site includes geospatial and tabular data as well as thousands of documents, archives and interviews. Ultimately, nearly all of the releasable data Felter is compiling on the Philippines case will be made available via the ESOC website. The non-digitize materials such as hardcopy records and taped interviews will be housed in the Hoover Institution’s Library and Archives.

“This will be the gold standard for micro-level conflict data. The planets aligned for us in many cases,” Felter said. The team also has had unprecedented access to data sources in Iraq and to some degree from Afghanistan, Columbia, and Mexico.

“What’s unique about ESOC is that we’re trying hard to make it easier for others to study conflict by pulling together everything we can on the conflicts we’ve studied,” says Shapiro. “On Iraq, for example, the ESOC website provides data on conflict outcomes, politics, and demographics, in addition to maps, links to other useful information sources, and all the files ESOC members have used in their research on Iraq.”

Shapiro says researchers working for the Canadian Armed Forces, the World Bank and the U.S. military have already turned to ESOC as a resource for data on Iraq “because it’s so useful to have everything in one place.”

The West Point Connection

Many of these documents, some dating back to 1975, were withering in the heat and humidity of an old building at army headquarters before Felter and his Philippine military team arrived to scan and record them.

Felter’s chief Filipino partner in compiling and analyzing the data is another West Point grad, Lt. Col. Dennis Eclarin, an Army Scout Ranger commander who led many of the counterinsurgency missions that he would later come to analyze. Eclarin conducted 1,500 hours of videotaped interviews with rebels who gave up their arms and surrendered.

Eclarin recalls being a lieutenant fresh out of West Point and negotiating the surrender of 20 communist rebels.

“I got the chance to interview the rebel commander of this very elite group, against whom I had been fighting in 2000, and when I interviewed him he said: `You know what? If you had just given us one water buffalo each, we would not have been fighting you, we would have just gone out and tilled our land,’” Eclarin recalls.

He would go on to interview hundreds of rebels and their commanders, such as the Islamic militant chief who talked tactics with him, then revealed that his greatest tool was his men’s belief that Allah was waiting for them on the other side.

There was the Roman Catholic nun who was running guns and money for the communists and the young college freshman recruited with the promise of $40 a month to support her family.
Eclarin heads up the team of coders supporting ESOC in the Philippines. Erwin Agustin, a Staff Sergeant in the Scout Rangers, does data entry – when he’s not out fighting rebels.

“The interviews and the coding has changed me – and it’s changed the perception of the Armed Forces, too,” Eclarin says. “We just appreciate data; we see it in a new light. We were just thinking short term, but the data allows us to look long-term and more strategically. Where are the hot zones we must avoid? What time of day are they likely to attack?”

Eclarin heads up the team of coders supporting ESOC in the Philippines. Erwin Agustin, a Staff Sergeant in the Scout Rangers, does data entry – when he’s not out fighting rebels.

“One time I was coding and was amazed to see the records of some of our comrades who had been ambushed and killed,” Agustin says. “Being a member of the Scout Rangers and seeing those who are missing – you hurt. But you must push through because you’re giving them a voice. They gave their lives for the Army, they sacrificed their lives for their families – and we are going to give them a voice.”

Erwin Olario, a civilian and the lead coder of Eclarin’s team, says the data is agnostic.

“We don’t take sides; we’re not out to prove anything. But, hey, if we could possibly contribute to bringing about peace one day – that would be something.”

The coders are now doubling back over the dataset from 1975 to 2012, to make sure it’s accurate and cleaned of classified details before it goes public. The data are the basis for two of Felter’s ongoing book projects and multiple journal articles, including a recent article in the American Economic Review entitled, “Aid Under Fire: Development Projects and Civil Conflict.”

Denis Eclarin and Joe Felter at a military ceremony outside Manila on Feb. 8, 2014. ©John Tronco



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Development and Civil Conflict

Another of Felter’s longtime Filipina friends is Corazon “Dinky” Soliman, cabinet secretary for the Philippine government’s Department of Social Welfare and Development. They go back to 1997, when the two were classmates working on their master’s in public administration at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

The two caught up on classmate gossip during a recent meeting in her Manila office. She was on a rare break from her work in the south, where Typhoon Haiyan had claimed more than 6,200 lives in November.

Soliman tells Felter she used a study based on ESOC data to help demonstrate the efficacy of her department’s conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. This flagship development program attempts to reduce poverty by giving cash to families falling under poverty thresholds, conditional on enrolling kids in school and getting them regular medical checkups and vaccines.

Soliman and her staff used the study conducted by Felter – and Benjamin Crost at the University of Illinois and Patrick B. Johnston at the RAND Corporation – in which they took an existing World Bank experiment in the Philippines that separated villages into those that would receive the cash transfers and those that would not. The scholars incorporated measures of violence from the ESOC data to estimate the effect of the CCT program on conflict intensity. They found cash transfers caused a substantial decrease in conflict-related incidents and, using their data on local insurgent influence, they determined the program significantly reduced insurgent influence in the villages that received the cash transfers compared with those that did not.

“Your results were very, very important and it had such a strong impact with the legislators, and in particular the budget, because they saw the program is not just about education and health,” Corazon tells Felter. “They saw it even has impact on peace and security.”

“That’s just great,” Felter says. “That’s what motivates our team to engage in this type of work and really what you want to hear. It’s such a privilege for us to support you in this capacity.”

A Rebel’s Redemption

Felter led the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team (CAAT) in Afghanistan, reporting directly to Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David Petaeus, before becoming a senior research scholar at CISAC and retiring from the military in 2012.

While he misses his time on active duty and the sense of purpose that comes with serving in combat, he believes his ESOC research will make a difference and have an impact in stabilizing conflict areas and setting conditions for development and governance efforts to be effective.

“In the last decade, the United States and the international community have devoted tens of billions of dollars towards rebuilding social and political order in troubled countries,” Shapiro says. “Thousands of families today are mourning loved ones lost in those efforts. ESOC is devoted to learning from that experience, and to making it easier for others to do so as well, so that we can all do a better job helping such places in the future.”

Traveling back to the Philippines often to meet with Eclarin and his coders keeps him tied to the men and women who are on the ground. And close to old colleagues such as Corpus, who was pardoned by President Corazon Aquino and went on to become the nation’s head of intelligence.

“Here’s the irony: The intelligence service was one of the organizations that was running after me, and then I was eventually assigned to head this very organization. Only in the Philippines,” says Corpus, whose counterinsurgency plan drafted in 1989 was hugely successful.

The communist New People’s Army is estimated to have approximately 5,000 rebels today, down from its high of 26,000 in the mid-1980s. And the government signed a hard-sought peace deal with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in last spring, which grants the Muslim areas of the southern Mindanao region greater political autonomy.

Still, many don’t believe the accord will hold and separatists from Moro National Liberation Front and the Abu Sayyef Group continue to threaten stability in the south.

“As long as the root forces remain – the income gap between the rich and the poor – there will always be rebellion,” says Corpus.

Hunger touches the lives of people throughout the world, from the affluent Bay Area to the most impoverished regions of rural Africa. Food security – the availability of plentiful, nutritious, and affordable food – is a pressing issue for rich and poor countries alike as the world population moves toward 9 billion by mid-century.

In her new book The Evolving Sphere of Food Security (Oxford University Press, August), Professor Rosamond Naylor takes a holistic approach to the question of how to feed the world. Naylor, a professor of environmental earth system science and director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), convened 18 colleagues from across Stanford’s diverse disciplines to shed light on the interdependent issues that affect global food security.

Throughout its 14 chapters, and a foreword by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the book takes up two important questions: How does the challenge of achieving food security change as countries develop economically? And how do food and agriculture policies in one country affect nutrition, food access, natural resources and national security in other countries?

Collaboration across disciplines

Naylor, who edited the volume and co-authored several chapters, explained that The Evolving Sphere of Food Security is the first book of its kind to engage faculty and scholars from across Stanford’s campus on issues of global hunger.

Professor Rosamond Naylor

“This book grew out of a recognition by Stanford scholars that food security is tied to security of many other kinds,” said Naylor, who is also William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “Food security has clear connections with energy, water, health, the environment and national security, and you can’t tackle just one of those pieces.”

Stanford has a long history of fostering cross-disciplinary work on global issues. It is in this spirit that the idea for the book was born, Naylor said. The book weaves together the expertise of authors from the fields of medicine, political science, engineering, law, economics and climate science.

“Stanford was the ideal place for this project. A book like this exemplifies how collaborative, interdisciplinary research can be greater than the sum of its parts,” Naylor said. “We have painted a much more inclusive picture of food security than if we had approached these questions from only one discipline.”

Rooted in field research

Another unique feature of the book is that each author’s insights are shaped by years of hands-on research and policymaking experience around the world.

Several authors, for example, have been instrumental in shaping U.S. and global food policy for decades. Walter Falcon, professor emeritus of economics and the deputy director of FSE, traces his career as an agricultural economics advisor to the Indonesian government, where he witnessed the country’s dramatic improvements in combating hunger and poverty since the 1960s.

Political science professor Stephen Stedman recounts his experience as a security policy advisor to the United Nations during the 2000s. Recognizing that food insecurity can exacerbate civil conflict, weaken governments and threaten international stability, Stedman worked to integrate food security into traditional security agendas.

Other authors have spent many years working in East Asia, Africa, South America, the Middle East and Europe. As a whole, said Naylor, the team has conducted well over a hundred years’ worth of field research all over the world.

Challenges evolve as countries develop

A recurring theme throughout the book – also reflected in its title – is the evolving nature of the food security challenges countries face as they move through stages of economic growth. At low levels of development, countries struggle to meet people’s basic needs. For example, Naylor’s chapter on health, co-authored with Eran Bendavid (medicine), Jenna Davis and Amy Pickering (civil and environmental engineering), describes a recent study showing that poor nutrition and rampant disease in rural Kenya is closely tied to contaminated, untreated drinking water. Addressing these essential health and sanitation issues is a key first step toward food security for the poorest countries.

As nations rise above the bottom rungs of development, they encounter new challenges. Scott Rozelle, director of the Rural Education Action Program, warns that middle income countries like China now face a “second food security crisis” of widespread micronutrient deficiency. Recent rapid economic and agricultural advancements have largely solved the problem of supplying sufficient calories. But this progress masks what Rozelle describes as “hidden hunger,” or a lack of vitamins and minerals that impedes kids’ school performance and could slow China’s long-term growth. Even in rich countries like the U.S., said Naylor, malnutrition can be a drag on educational and economic performance.

Developed countries face other unique tradeoffs in the use of resources for food production. In his chapter on water institutions, Buzz Thompson, professor of law and co-director of the Woods Institute, explains that conflicts over water increase between smallholder and industrial users as countries develop. Eric Lambin, professor of environmental earth system science, and Ximena Rueda, research associate in earth sciences, offer the paradox that as countries grow wealthier, changing patterns of agricultural land use may actually worsen food security by fueling the spread of obesity and diabetes.

At its core, said Naylor, The Evolving Sphere of Food Security is about more than economic and policy trends. “The book puts a human face to food security, because hunger is an intensely human experience,” she said. “This book tells an integrated story about people’s lives, and how they are shaped by resource use and the policy process around global food security.”

The Japanese Cabinet, headed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, announced a reinterpretation of the country’s Constitution on July 1st, marking a significant shift in its pacifist security policy that it has held for nearly seventy years.

A controversial aspect of the Constitution’s reinterpretation concerns Article 9, a defense clause that outlaws a traditional military and use of force to settle disputes. The recent announcement, however, suggests lifting Japan’s ban on collective self-defense, extending the country’s ability to apply use of force not only to respond to an armed attack against Japan but also when an armed attack occurs against its allies.

Ryo Sahashi, a visiting associate professor at Shorenstein APARC, writes on the %link1% that it is necessary for Japan to enhance its deterrence through greater diplomacy, not just an enlargement of its military. He says Japan, like other nations, is entitled to secure its territory and pursue its own alliance partners. However, the lack of public support toward the reinterpretation is concerning, and will present challenges as the administration seeks to implement its new policies.

Sahashi also spoke with %link2% about Japan’s changing security paradigm in the context of Mr. Abe’s state visit to Canberra, Australia. He points out that it will take a year for the administration to change the laws associated with the Constitution’s reinterpretation, saying this time gap will allow the Government to shore up national support. His interview is available below, it starts around minute 1:12.

Following the Cabinet’s announcement, a poll conducted by the Yomiuri Shimbun reported a 48 percent approval rating of the Abe administration, down nine percentage points when compared to last month. Daniel Sneider, the associate director for research at Shorenstein APARC, says in the %link3% that the poll reflects the public’s lack of support for the policy changes.

Eyes remain focused on Indonesia as votes for candidates Joko Widodo and Prabowo Subianto are counted in the country’s landmark presidential election.

On Wednesday, the polls reflected a precariously even divide between Widodo, also referred to as "Jowoki," the governor of Jakarta, and Prabowo, an ex-general and son-in-law of the country’s former dictator Suharto. Initial polls show Jowoki holds a slight lead, but the government has yet to declare an outright winner, with neither side conceding at the moment. 

Donald Emmerson, director of the Southeast Asia Forum at Shorenstein APARC, answers a few questions about the election and what it could mean for Indonesia’s fledging democracy.

This election will transfer power from incumbent president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the first to lead the country since its democratic transition. Is this election a turning point for Indonesia?

It is. It is only the third direct presidential election in the history of Indonesia. The first two, in 2004 and 2009, yielded landslide victories for Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), giving him two consecutive presidential terms as president. His large margins of victory were, in effect, incontestable. In contrast, the presidential election on 9 July is being sharply contested, based on various "quick count" estimates of who won and by how much. Some of those estimates say that Joko Widodo ("Jokowi") has won. A smaller number of estimates assign victory to his opponent, Prabowo Subianto. These estimated margins of "quick count" success by one candidate over the other are typically small: the differences run between 1 and 5 percent.

These small margins asserted on behalf of contradictory outcomes have politicized the voting-and-counting procedure and stimulated fears of fraud. Prabowo in particular appears to be challenging the legitimacy of a possible win by Jokowi when the official result is announced. That announcement is scheduled to be made by the General Elections Commission on 22 July.

If the official margin of victory is very slender, whether for Jokowi or for Prabowo, the losing campaign could request a ruling on the matter by the Constitutional Court. If the request is taken up by the court, another month could elapse before a legal judgment is issued. Under this alarming if hypothetical scenario, Indonesia's political future could remain in a prolonged limbo conducive to major unrest. 

Given that the polls reflect a tightly contested race, will the losing party accept defeat?

Who knows? It will depend on what happens. That said, there are powerful reasons to believe that the loser, whoever he is, will think twice before taking his case to the streets. The onus on such vengeance as endangering Indonesia's fledgling democracy would be great. We also need to remember that if, as many expect, the election commission (and perhaps, later, the Constitutional Court) validates Jokowi as the next president, he is likely to face a parliamentary majority that supported Prabowo. Indeed, only 37 percent of the seats in the main national legislature are occupied by members of parties that endorsed Jokowi. If Prabowo is declared the loser, and the evidence of electoral malfeasance is absent or minor, Prabowo may accept having lost if he knows he can retain substantial influence over national policy while preparing for another presidential run in 2019. 

Both candidates campaigned on widespread platforms that called for reform in many areas ­– from energy to anti-corruption. What issues are Indonesians most concerned about?

Basically, poverty and corruption. But many Indonesians allocate their votes based less on policy distinctions than on the personalities of the candidates. Prabowo's ability to catch up with Jokowi in popularity during the campaign reflects in no small measure his more charismatic and commanding personality in contrast to Jokowi's relatively lackluster performance.

What steps can the next administration take to keep Indonesia from slipping back to its authoritarian past?

The two candidates are very different in this regard. Prabowo is a former general. He has been implicated in major violations of human rights. He is linked to the autocratic regime that preceded Indonesia's current democratic experiment. One can imagine many steps that Prabowo could take as president to nudge Indonesia back onto its former authoritarian track. He has already said that direct elections are not good for Indonesia.  

As for Jokowi, were he to become president, his task would be to achieve a level of probity and progress in Indonesia sufficient to convince the country that democracy can be effective not just in theory but in practice as well.

Emmerson also spoke about the election with Deutsche Welle on 16 July, and the Voice of America on 9 July.

According to a new study co-authored by Stanford professor David Lobell, the chance of a worldwide slowdown in agricultural yield growth in the next two decades is significantly higher due to global warming.

Lobell and co-author Claudia Tebaldi, a senior researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, set out to estimate the odds of a steep drop in global wheat and corn yield progress under several climate scenarios. The study, “Getting caught with our plants down: the risks of a global crop yield slowdown from climate trends in the next two decades” appeared in Environmental Research Letters.

Lobell said he was motivated to pursue the study based on questions posed by stakeholders and decision makers in governments and the private sector.

“I’m often asked whether climate change will threaten food supply, as if it’s a simple yes or no answer,” Lobell said. “The truth is that over a 10 or 20 year period, it depends largely on how fast the Earth warms, and we can’t predict that very precisely. So the best we can do is try to determine the odds.”

Lobell and Tebaldi calculated the chance of a 10 percent global yield loss from climate change over the next 20 years, which would represent a severe impact on food supply, enough to roughly halve the rate of yield growth.

The short time frame of the study was deliberate, Lobell said. “Many studies have looked at climate and agriculture trends over the coming 50 or 100 years. But the next two decades are when most of the global population growth, and dietary shifts driven by a growing middle class, will occur. The growth rate of food demand will be higher during this time than at any other time in the next century.”

Without human-induced global warming – in other words, in a world with only natural climate variability – the likelihood of a yield drop that large is only 1 in 200. But when the team accounted for global warming, they saw the odds jump to 1 in 10 for corn and 1 in 20 for wheat. “In this study, we did not try to estimate the most likely impacts of climate change on crops,” Lobell said. “Rather, we estimated the likelihood of a really major impact, not because we want to scare people, but because there are many people who want to be prepared for all contingencies.”

“The point of the paper is to move from hand-waving about scenarios of what could go wrong, to specific and transparent estimates of the actual odds,” Lobell said. “The odds are not very high, but they are significant and a lot bigger than they used to be. The people asking these questions are accustomed to planning for scenarios with much less than a 10 percent chance of happening, so it will be interesting to see whether this study has any effect on how they operate.”

Lobell adds that organizations working toward global food security, and related issues such as conflict prevention, are most interested in the next 20 years because their decisions rarely consider the more distant future.  “As scientists, we might prefer to work on time scales in which the answers are clearer, but we also want to be responsive to the actual concerns and questions that decision makers have.”

Lobell is associate professor of Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford and associate director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. He is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Contact:

David Lobell: dlobell@stanford.edu

Laura Seaman, Communications and External Relations Manager, Center on Food Security and the Environment: lseaman@stanford.edu

Stanford economist Takeo Hoshi’s new co-authored working paper, “Implementing Structural Reforms in Abenomics: How to Reduce the Cost of Doing Business in Japan,” is cited in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.