The United States continues to endure the worst drought to hit the country in over 50 years. Although conditions have improved, 53 percent of the US is still experiencing moderate or worse levels of drought. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) projected last week that the drought will reduce the nation’s corn yield by 13 percent and soybean yield by 12 percent. As the world’s largest exporter of corn, soybean and wheat, this major disruption in U.S. supply is already having an impact on global food prices.

Is this summer a glimpse of what our future could look like under a changing climate, and what does that mean for the world’s poor who are disproportionately impacted by volatile food prices? What policy options are available to help avoid a repeat of the 2007-2008 food crisis? I sat down with FSE visiting scholar Thomas Hertel, an agricultural economist from Purdue University, to discuss these questions and related research as he wraps up his sabbatical year here at Stanford.

DEAN: The current drought has already had a dramatic impact on US corn prices, exceeding record highs of $8 a bushel. While American consumers are unlikely to feel the impacts until next year, the spike in corn prices has sparked debate over whether to drop or temporarily suspend US ethanol mandates to free up supply and ease the pressure on world food prices. In April, you published a paper in Nature Climate Change with Stanford environmental scientist Noah Diffenbaugh that looked at this very scenario.

How are current biofuel policies affecting the market’s ability to respond to extreme weather events like the current drought?

HERTEL: The remarkable thing about that paper is how timely it was. We predicted a volatile interplay between an extremely hot summer and the Renewable Fuel Standard for corn ethanol, and that is what we are now seeing, with the value of the mandates’ Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) accruing greater value as the drought deepens. There are increasing calls for a waiver of the mandated 13.2 billion gallons of corn ethanol needed to meet this year’s federal renewable-fuel standards. This new source of demand (about 40 percent of production last year) has absorbed virtually all of the increased output the US has generated over the past eight years. By limiting the ability of commodity markets to adjust to yield fluctuations, biofuel mandates work in exactly the wrong direction. These price spikes are likely to be even larger in the future if these policies are not altered.

DEAN: In that same paper you warn that extreme weather events, like the current drought, are likely to become more common and potentially even more intense under a changing climate. To better understand the impacts of climate change on global agricultural production, trade, prices and poverty you have developed a global trade analysis model (GTAP), now used by over 10,000 members. Some of those results were published in a 2010 paper with FSE fellow David Lobell and FSE affiliated researcher Marshall Burke.

What have been some of the most interesting findings to come out of that model?

HERTEL: Prior to the publication of our 2010 paper in Global Environmental Change, most studies of climate change and poverty focused on the likely impact on prices and low income food consumers. Our paper was one of the first to examine the impact on wages and farm incomes. We found that low income farm households in regions of the world that are relatively less hard hit by climate change may actually benefit from the ensuing rise in world prices. Of course, low income consumers worldwide, as well as farmers in the regions hardest hit by climate change, such as Southern Africa and South Asia, will be hurt.

DEAN: Poor households in developing countries spend a disproportionately large amount of their disposable income on food. Even small price spikes can have a large impact.

What policies are needed to help protect the world’s poorest from price volatility?

HERTEL: This is an important question. Being a trade economist, I think immediately of trade policies and their role in improving or worsening the situation. From a global perspective, the best thing that can be done is for all regions of the world to share in the needed adjustments to events like the US drought of 2012. If all countries were to adjust their corn use by just a modest  amount, the shortfall could be accommodated more easily. However, the evidence from the 2007-2008 commodity crisis suggests that many countries – most notably India and China – responded to the crisis by adjusting border policies so as to shield domestic consumers from the price rise, thereby failing to share in the adjustment. This, in turn, made the world price rise larger and worsened the situation for low income households in other developing countries.

DEAN: In addition to focusing on climate change impacts on agriculture and poverty, you have a long-standing interest in agricultural impacts on the environment, and the role economics can play in mitigating agriculture’s destructive planetary impacts. The latter is particularly important given that agricultural production accounts for 70 percent of global freshwater consumption, 38 percent of total land use, and 14 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

How are economic forces impacting the kind of farming we see today?

HERTEL: One of agriculture’s most important impacts on the environment has been its contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). Farming accounts for a disproportionate share of GHGs, including nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer applications, methane emissions from livestock and paddy rice, as well as indirect emissions from the conversion of tropical forests to agricultural uses. There is little doubt that the globalization of agriculture has contributed to an acceleration of land conversion in some regions which had previously been insulated from world markets. New agricultural technologies offer great hope for moderating such GHG emissions – both by reducing the emissions intensity of agricultural production and by reducing the total amount of land required to feed the world. And there is evidence that more rigorous enforcement of restrictions on land conversion in places like the Amazon can have a tangible impact on global emissions. So the answer lies in a combination of investments, regulations and enforcement. We have explored the potential for agriculture and land-based mitigation policies to contribute to reduced GHG emissions – as well as the implications for food security – in a joint project with the UN-Food and Agriculture Organization. These findings are forthcoming in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

DEAN: While at Stanford, you have had the opportunity to work closely with climate and earth system scientists to conduct research on the energy-water-land-agriculture-climate nexus under the umbrella of John Weyant’s Integrated Assessment Modeling (IAM) project and with former Purdue colleague, Noah Diffenbaugh.

How did you enjoy working in such an interdisciplinary environment?

HERTEL: This was the first deeply interdisciplinary experience of my career and it was both challenging and rewarding. Noah is the person who first stimulated my research interest in climate change five years ago. The idea that extreme events could have an important impact on agriculture, food prices and poverty is something that we have been exploring intensively since that time. However, it was only in the context of this sabbatical—with the help of Martin Scherer and Monika Verma—that we were able to really get our teeth into the issue, resulting in the April paper.

DEAN: You also taught an interdisciplinary graduate seminar with FSE fellow David Lobell on global agricultural land use change in 2050.

What sort of lessons did you learn from teaching an interdisciplinary seminar?

HERTEL: I really enjoyed the opportunity and the challenge of teaching an interdisciplinary course. I was fortunate to work closely with David Lobell in designing this course, as the structure was different from the typical economics course which I have taught in the past. Teaching the course also changed my perspective on which research questions are most important. Sometimes the points that most intrigue economists are of little broader relevance, while some of those issues which seem obvious to economists are deserving of much greater attention, more thorough investigation and better communication to the broader scientific community. I plan to offer this course when I return to Purdue, and I am also planning to write a textbook based on this course.

DEAN: You have also been working on the launch of an open source data program called GEOSHARE (Geospatial, Open-Source Hosting of Agriculture, Resources and Environmental Data).

What does GEOSHARE do and why is it needed?

Hertel: Feeding 9 billion people in 2050 in the face of a changing climate, while preserving the environment and eliminating extreme poverty, is one of the most important challenges facing us today. Yet the data currently available to understand how global and local phenomena affect the agriculture-environment-poverty nexus are insufficient to advance needed discovery and enable effective decision making. In order to address this limitation, we have initiated GEOSHARE. During my time at Stanford I was able to finalize funding for a two-year pilot effort aimed at providing proof of concept. It will prototype this freely available, global, spatially explicit database which will be accompanied by analysis tools and training programs for new scientists, decision makers, and development practitioners.

What will you take away with you from your time spent here on the Farm?

HERTEL: I greatly enjoyed my colleagues and conducting research, auditing courses (including a course in Geographical Information Science and David Lobell’s course in Climate and Agriculture) and teaching. But I also had great fun cycling and hiking in the hills around Palo Alto, windsurfing, singing in a local choir, and partaking of all that San Francisco has to offer. This is a lovely place to spend a sabbatical leave!

From Shanghai to São Paulo, people around the world are living longer than ever, challenging long-held ideas about retirement and well-established national retirement systems. Stanford health economists Karen Eggleston and Victor R. Fuchs offer an innovative view of the global aging phenomenon in an article published recently in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Drawing on a century of demographic data from 17 countries, Eggleston and Fuchs show that the share of increases in life expectancy realized after age 65 was only about 20 percent at the beginning of the 20th century but close to 80 percent by the dawn of the 21st century. Expected lifetime labor force participation as a percent of life expectancy is now declining. Eggleston and Fuchs share four interrelated responses to the economic and social challenges posed by this “new demographic transition:”

• Increase the retirement age.
• Encourage savings.
• Strengthen education.
• Emphasize healthy lifestyles early to ensure productivity in old age.

Eggleston is director of the Asia Health Policy Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Fuchs is Henry J. Kaiser, Jr., Professor Emeritus, in Stanford’s Department of Economics and Department of Health Research and Policy, and a senior fellow at FSI and SIEPR.

Of the four policy responses the article proposes, is one especially critical?

Fuchs: The most important solution in terms of its potential impact would be people changing their attitudes toward retirement. This would mean people postponing retirement and saving more during their working years. If you work five years longer, for example, you would have greater savings and a shorter period of time when you would need the money.

Eggleston: We tend to think of the solutions as being interrelated. To address this longstanding and inevitable global demographic transition, organizations and policy structures need to support changes in individual behavior. In the case of the retirement age in the United States and European countries, policymakers need to change the many incentives that encourage people to retire younger.

What do you most hope policymakers will take away from the article?

Fuchs: We hope they will recognize the absolute need for individuals and organizations to plan for later retirement.

What are the special challenges faced by China and India, the world’s largest populations?

Eggleston: Longer lives in China and India contribute to improved human development, yet population aging also brings special challenges. China’s population is aging more rapidly than India’s and both countries need to invest more in the education and health of their young people, especially in poor rural areas.

In India, nutrition and education will help to reap a one-time boost to economic growth if the large cohorts of the working age population can be productively employed, while building a foundation for sustained improvement of living standards. China’s youth need to be as productive as possible to support the elderly while continuing to improve the national living standard.

The coming decade will be crucial in China, as the country transitions into a new economic phase and expands its fledging social protection system. The goal should be to ameliorate disparities and protect the vulnerable, while maintaining a financially sustainable and culturally appropriate balance of government and family responsibility for old-age support.

The demise of Moammar Gadhafi’s regime gave Abdulhafid Sidoun a second chance at life.

Six days before Sidoun was to be executed for promoting democracy in Libya, rebels toppled the government and emptied the country’s jails of its political prisoners. After more than five months of beatings and abuse on death row, Sidoun was free. Weeks later, Gadhafi was dead, gunned down by the rebels.

Sidoun’s fight to bring democracy and accountability to Libya is far from over. Qadaffi’s 40-year stranglehold starved Libya of political debate and evolution, and Sidoun knew he needed a crash-course in building an open, stable society. He received one this summer at Stanford, joining 23 other pro-democracy advocates from 22 countries in the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program on Democracy and Development.

“Gadhafi is gone, but we still have a corrupt system we need to clean up,” says Sidoun, a Tripoli-based lawyer who waged a social media campaign to unite Gadhafi opponents. “My country needs me now. I have to work with my friends and colleagues and other lawyers and tell them what I’ve learned.”

Abdulhafid Sidoun was sentenced to death for trying to topple Moammar Gadhafi’s regime. Photo credit: Rod Searcey

He has chronic back pain from the blows dealt by prison guards. And he winces when he talks about being torn from his family and isolated in a dark cell where he had no idea how – or even whether – the revolt against Gadhafi was unfolding until rebels broke him free.

For three weeks in late July and early August, Sidoun and the other fellows participated in faculty-led sessions on democracy, economic development, global health and hunger, human rights and the new technologies making it easier to organize and inspire reform. They took field trips to San Francisco and Monterey and met with officials at Google, Facebook and the Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm that is contributing to the fellowship program.

And they spent time getting to know each other. Entrepreneurs, lawyers, journalists, politicians and civil society leaders sharing stories of overwhelming repression and the small successes they’ve had in trying to reform governments in places like Chile, China, Serbia and Zimbabwe.

“Everyone here has different stories and cultures, but we all talk about the same corruption,” Sidoun says. “We are learning that our problems are not very different.”

Fighting ignorance, encouraging debate

Now in its eighth year, the Draper Hills program – run by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies – has created and grown a worldwide network of up-and-coming leaders.

About 200 fellows from more than 60 countries have passed through the program and are now trying to craft policy and bring about political and economic reform.

“Many governments in Latin America are suffering from very strong political leaders who were elected presidents but think they are little kings or queens who own the country,” says Laura Alonso, a national representative in the Argentine Congress selected as one of this year’s fellows.

“The main problem is that the people who become so powerful distort the rule of law,” she says. “There is a rule of law for their friends and a different rule of law for their enemies. So this is what I want to go home and address – how can we have a rule of law that applies to everyone? My time at Stanford is giving me the perspective I need to go back to the basics of democracy.”

The fellowship program also addresses the overlap of business and government, and has increased its emphasis on the role entrepreneurs play in building democracy.

"We have brought a few entrepreneurs into the group of fellows," says Kathryn Stoner, an expert on Russia who lectured to the fellows about democratic transitions. "It is good for them to know how to get around corrupt practices in government. We also know that a strong middle class is the backbone of democracy. Once people have property, they tend to want to protect it as well as to demand representation for any taxes they pay. Encouraging entrepreneurship then is a good way to pursue both economic and political development worldwide."

While they’re all at Stanford to learn, the fellows are eager to share their newfound knowledge.

Kamal Siddiqi uses his position as a newspaper editor to strengthen democracy in Pakistan. Photo credit: Rod Searcey

Bassim Assuqair was raised in Yemen by parents who forbade him from working as a teenager so he could devote all his energy to his studies. After earning a degree in English education from Sana’a University, he has worked for various development organizations. But he’s most interested in organizing Yemen’s youth and teaching them about the benefits of living in a country with free elections and the rule of law.

“There is so much ignorance, so much illiteracy in my country,” he says. “The people aren’t bad. They’re simple. They need awareness. I want them to know peace. It’s my task – I am ordering myself – to explain to others what I’m learning here.”

Kamal Siddiqi is another self-styled evangelist of democracy. As editor of The Express Tribune, an English-language daily in Pakistan, Siddiqi uses the newspaper as a check on government power while making the case that “a very bad elected prime minister is still better than a very good dictator.”

As a Draper Hills fellow, Siddiqi picked up technological tips and made connections with Stanford faculty that will help him better monitor crime, corruption and his country’s upcoming elections.

“I want to draw on the strength of the faculty and fellows of CDDRL to write for my newspaper,” he says. “They will play a part in my attempt to introduce some more ideas and issues in the general debate on elections and democracy.”

A chance to reflect

When FSI Director Coit D. Blacker and a core group of FSI’s senior fellows – including CDDRL Director Larry Diamond, Stoner-Weiss, former Stanford President Gerhard Casper and Michael A. McFaul, now Washington’s ambassador to Moscow – created the fellowship program, they wanted to give practitioners a chance to reflect and learn about democratic theory.

"We felt that practitioners from developing countries or countries in political and economic transition often feel isolated in the work that they do and they burn out," says Stoner-Weiss. "There were no such programs for international practitioners when we began eight years ago. We wanted to provide them with a sense of international community and the knowledge that they are not toiling away on their own." 

And the lessons the fellows learn from Stanford faculty can be invaluable. When it comes to building a constitution – something several of the fellows grapple with – Francis Fukuyama says there’s only a certain amount of time for a newly formed government to “get it right.”

FSI's Gerhard Casper waves a copy of the Magna Carta while speaking to the fellows about the rule of law. Photo credit: Rod Searcey

“If you don’t, your window of opportunity slams shut,” says Fukuyama, a FSI senior fellow who lectured to the group about economic development and governance.

“But you don’t want to invite more problems by not thinking through exactly what kind of government you want," he says. "You need to have a theoretical and academic perspective.”

And the learning goes both ways.

“I’m getting the problems and issues of 22 countries downloaded onto me in a very short period of time,” says Erik Jensen, a law professor and CDDRL faculty member who also helped start the fellowship program.

“The fellows bring important insights and opinions that don’t land on the front page of The New York Times, but are integral to understanding what’s going on in the developing world,” he says. “That’s pretty great to have in one room.”

Courage, risk and magic

After building momentum and attracting a growing number of faculty who wanted to work with the fellows, the program that began in 2005 quickly caught the interest of venture capitalist Bill Draper and philanthropist Ingrid Hills. Their $1.5 million gift gave the program its name in 2007.

Draper’s interest in the program is deeply tied to his background running the United Nations Development Programme between 1986 and 1994.

“There are wonderfully courageous leaders in this world who are willing to take risks,” Draper says. “It’s magical what can happen, and I’ve seen how one person really can make an enormous difference. A lot of people selected for this fellowship program have that opportunity.”

Hills anticipates the fellows will create a network that extends beyond the three weeks they spend together at Stanford. And former fellows plan to connect in Africa later this year to explore how to combat regional corruption and increase government accountability.

“My hope is that the program will give the fellows the knowledge and tools to build an infrastructure in their respective countries based on democratic principles,” Hills said.

Diamond, whose opening day lecture on defining democracy sets the stage for the learning that unfolds over the coming weeks, says the program ultimately invests in people with the potential to expand democracy.

“It gives them skills, ideas and comparative experiences to draw on,” he says. “Some of these people will continue to work in an important and incremental way to advance and defend human rights and the rule of law. Some will go on to have very prominent roles in government and civil society.”

Life sentence

Some of them, like Ethiopia’s Birtukan Midekssa, are already renowned political leaders whose stories underscore the most extreme hardships of building democracy.

Pardoned from the lifelong prison sentence she received for opposing Ethiopia's authoritarian government, Birtukan Midekssa is still fighting for democratic reform. Photo credit: Rod Searcey

By the second time Midekssa was in prison, her daughter was old enough to ask if her mother was going to come home.

“I’ll be back,” Midekssa told the 3-year-old. But the promise was tenuous. She was serving a life sentence, convicted of trying to overthrow Ethiopia’s constitutional order. Her actual crime was promoting honest democracy in a country run by a government intolerant of dissent and dismissive of civil liberties.

She was first sentenced to life in prison in 2005. Her daughter was 8 months old and Midekssa – then a federal judge – was just elected deputy chair of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy. Her party had won a majority in parliament, but Prime Minister Meles Zenawi cracked down on the rising opposition. Midekssa and about 30,000 others were thrown in jail. Security forces killed nearly 200 demonstrators during rallies that began peacefully.

Midekssa was pardoned 18 months later, but re-arrested in 2008 after being accused of violating the terms of that agreement. She had also recently been elected chair of a new opposition group.

“They had me in solitary confinement and cut off from the entire world,” she says. “Sometimes I felt like the whole world was forgetting about me.”

It had not. When she was pardoned again in 2010, throngs of overjoyed supporters greeted her with shouts, songs and dance when she returned to her neighborhood in Addis Ababa.

But Midekssa was drained. Her party was weakened and her political prospects were uncertain. With few options in Ethiopia, she and her daughter moved to the United States in 2011.

“There was little I could do,” she says. “I wanted to learn more, study more and figure out how to establish democracy and stability.”

Landing a Draper Hills fellowship meant the chance to tap into a deep academic perspective and think about how she might take another pass at building democracy when Ethiopia’s authoritarian system shows some sign of opening up.

“She’s not a revolutionary in favor of violence or radical change,” Diamond says. “If the regime decides it wants to negotiate a process of political reform and put the political system on the foundations of greater legitimacy, she’s one of the first people they’d need to reach out to.”

But until they do, Midekssa will wait patiently. Studying. Retooling. Sharing her experiences. And repeating the promise she made to her daughter years ago:

“I’ll be back.”