February 10th marked the launch of the Program on Food Security and the Environment's Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series. Setting the stage for the two-year series were Jeff Raikes, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Greg Page, CEO and Chairman of Cargill Inc. As CEOs from the largest foundation and the largest agricultural firm in the world they provided important perspectives on global food security in these particularly volatile times. Full video and clips of the event are now available - Improving Food Security in the 21st Century: What are the Roles for Firms and Foundations.

Jeff Raikes: A Perspective from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Catalytic philanthropy

The Gates Foundation, through its Agricultural Development Initiative, has been a leader in addressing global food security issues. The Foundation allocates 25% of its resources to global development and to addressing the needs of the 1 billion people who live in extreme poverty ($1/day). 70-75% of those people live in rural areas and are dependent on subsistence agriculture for their livelihoods.

The Gates Foundation is driven by the principle: how can it invest its resources in ways that can leverage performance and address market failures? Its approach embodies a novel concept driven by both private sector motives and public responsibilities. Raikes describes this as catalytic philanthropy.

"The Foundation identifies where its investments can create an innovation, a new intervention that can really raise the quality of lives for people," said Raikes. "If successful, it can be scaled up and sustained by the private sector if we can show that there is a profit opportunity or the public sector if we can show that this is a better way to improve the overall quality of society through investment in public dollars."

Image Photo credit: Michael Prince

In the realm of agriculture, allocating resources across the agricultural value chain has proven to be the most effective approach. As an example of this strategy, Raikes talked about a farmer-owned, Gates-supported dairy chilling plant in Kenya. The cooling facility provided the storage necessary to provide a predictable price at which to sell farmers' milk. This price knowledge and market access gave farmers the confidence to invest in better technology and better dairy cattle. The plant also provided artificial insemination services and extension services to teach farmers how to get greater amounts of milk from the cattle.

"I love the concept. I also love the numbers," said Raikes. "In just two or three years there were now 3,000 farmers in a 25 kilometer radius that were able to access this dairy chilling plant and able to sell their milk."

In addition to improving incomes, Raikes remarked that very consistently what he hears is when farmers are able to improve their incomes the first thing they do with the money is invest in the education of their children.

Upcoming challenges to food security

During the next 40 years or so, global food production must double to accommodate a growing and richer population. Climate change and water scarcity contribute to this challenge. The places that will suffer the most severe weather are also the places where the poorest farmers live. 95% of sub-Saharan agriculture is rain fed with very little irrigation.

"If we are going to be able to feed the world we are going to have to figure out how to achieve more crop per drop," cautioned Raikes. "This includes trying to breed crop varieties that will better withstand water shortages. Early results show that you can get as much as a 20% increase in yield or more under stressed conditions when you have varieties that are bred for that need."

These challenges are compounded by the current economic crisis that is putting pressure on budgets in both donor and developing countries. In 2009, the G20 committed 22 billion dollars to agricultural development in recognition of the importance of agricultural development to food security. However, of the 22 billion promised, 224 million dollars went to five countries in the first round of grants in June. By November, when 21 additional countries submitted their proposals, just 97 million dollars were available to be dispersed and 17 countries were turned away empty handed.

High- and low-tech solutions

In an effort to alleviate some of this deficit, the Gates Foundation has committed 300 million dollars in six grants that span the value chain. These include investments in science and technology, farm management practices, farmer productivity, and market access as well as the data and policy environment to support the Foundation's work. The grants are intended to support about 5 ½ million farm families in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

"We believe innovative solutions can come from both high-tech and low-tech," said Raikes. "On the high-tech end, submergent genes are allowing rice crops to survive periods of flooding up to 15 days. In areas of rice farming prone to flooding, this can save entire crops traditionally wiped out by such weather disasters."

Image Photo credit IRRI/Ariel Javellana

The sub1gene seeds are now being used by 400,000 farmers and are on track to be used by 20 million rice farmers by 2017. On the low-tech end, the Gates Foundation is providing $2 triple layer bags to farmers to reduce crop loss from pests; an affordable solution that has increased average income per farmer by $150/year.

"We primarily support conventional breeding, but we also support biotechnology breeding. In some cases we think that breeders in Africa and South Asia will want to take advantage of the modern tools we use here in our country to provide better choices for their farmers," explained Raikes.

Reasons for optimism

After years of diminished support, US Agricultural Development assistance to sub-Saharan Africa has gone from about 650 million in 2005 to about 1.5 billion in 2009. In developing countries, the Comprehensive Agricultural Development Program (CADP) in Africa has challenged countries to dedicate 10% of their national budgets to agriculture with the goal of improving annual agricultural growth by 6%. 20 countries have signed on to the CADP compacts, and 10 countries are exceeding the 6% growth target. Finally, since 1990, 1.3 billion people worldwide have lifted themselves out of poverty primarily through improvements in agricultural productivity.

Raikes pointed to Ghana as a success story. Since 1990, casaba production, an important staple food for poor smallholder farmers, has increased fivefold. Tomato production increased six fold. The cocoa sector has been revived and hunger has been cut by 75%.

"The key to success in Ghana was a combination of getting the right developing country policy with the right macroeconomic reform, the right institutional reform, smart public investment, and an overall good policy environment," said Raikes.

Supporting good policy is an important part of the Foundation's food security strategy, and was a strong motivation behind its funding of FSE's Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium series.

"We see this symposium series as an opportunity to gather policy leaders who will bring new ideas of what will be effective policy approaches and effective economic environments in the countries we care a lot about, in particular sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia," said Raikes.

Raikes concluded his remarks by reminding everyone that the key to improving food security globally is making sure women, who make up at least 70% of the farm labor population, are included in the equation.

Greg Page: Balancing the race to caloric sufficiency with rural sociology

As the largest global agricultural firm, Cargill has an influential role to play in the world of food and agriculture. Cargill is a major supplier of food and crops and a provider of farmer services, inputs, and market access.

Image Photo credit: Olaf Hammelburg

Together with the Gates Foundation, Cargill has reached out and trained 200,000 cocoa farmers in the Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Cameroon. One tribe and one small village at a time the company has helped improve food safety, quality maintenance, and storage; benefiting the farmers, Cargill, and customers further down the supply chain. Cargill has also assisted, through financing and product purchasing, 265,000 farmers in Benin, Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast, Malawi, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Can the world feed itself?

A billion people lack sufficient caloric intake on a daily basis. In sub-Saharan Africa, 38% of all children are chronically malnourished, largely the result of inadequate agricultural productivity. While nine of the ten countries that have the highest prevalence of malnourishment are in sub-Saharan Africa, the two countries with the largest absolute number of malnourished people are India and China.

"This points to the difficulty of this problem," said Page. "India exports corn and soybean protein and China has 2.5 trillion dollars of hard currency reserves. These issues aren't necessarily of ability to feed people, but a willingness and commitment to do so."

Can the world feed itself? Yes, said Page.

When you break down the number of calories needed per malnourished person per day and convert that to tons of whole grains required to extinguish that hunger you get 30 million tons; 1/6 the amount of grain we converted to fuel globally last year. In the U.S. alone, 40% of our corn goes to ethanol.

"It isn't an issue of caloric famine-it is an issue of economic famine," stated Page. "In other words, this is not a food supply problem, but rather the lack of purchasing power to pay for a diet. An adequate price must be assured to reward the farmer for his efforts and to provide enough money that she can do it again the following year."

Rural sociology premium

What we face is the need to keep smallholders on the farm-despite the fact that they may not be the low-cost producer of foodstuffs-in order to avoid a rural population migration that would be unsustainable. As a result, the challenge the world faces is who is going to pay that rural sociology premium? If it costs more to raise crops on small farms is that burden going to be borne by the urban poor or is there going to be an alternative funding mechanism that allows smallholders to succeed?

Image Photo credit: Cargill

What is the survival price for a smallholder farmer? Page explained that if you wanted a family of four on a farm in sub-Saharan Africa to receive an income commensurate with the average per capita income of the urban population, you would come up with a price near $400 a ton.

"To put this in context, the highest price for maize that has ever been reached here in the United States is about $275 a ton," said Page. "This rural sociology premium to sustain smallholders is not an insignificant amount of money. How do we achieve fairness between the revenue received by the rural smallholder and the price borne by the urban consumer?"

State of disequilibrium - complacency to crisis

Today we are experiencing incredible price volatility where commodity prices are in a continuous state of disequilibrium. Very small changes in production have outsized impacts on price. This is in contrast to the last two and a half decades when the world operated with fairly robust stocks due to crop subsidies in the United States and Western Europe.

"This period of subsidization was when the western world probably did more harm to sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia than any other period in history," said Page. "We refused to allow price to signal to western farmers to produce less. As a result, the world price of grains fell far below the ability of any smallholder to compete. We then shipped those surpluses to developing countries, which then failed to invest in their agriculture for decades."

Today we are lurching from complacency to crisis. The ability of information and market speculation to be transmitted rapidly is affecting purchasing decisions of thousands to millions of consumers. Rising fuel prices, export restrictions, increasing demand for crops for biofuels, and unpredictable weather have all contributed to higher prices. Some of the drivers of price, however, are good things, such as the increase in per capita income and the capacity of more people to have a more dense and nutritious diet.

"Interestingly, the upside of the ethanol and biofuels program is that it brought prices back to a sufficiency that reinvigorated investment in agriculture," noted Page. "On one level I think a very good argument could be made that the biofuels program brought the world further from famine than it ever had been because of the price."

Critical food security factors

Page concluded by summarizing the elements that Cargill believes are critically important to increase food security. The first is the ability to understand the tradeoffs between a fast path to caloric sufficiency and the needs of rural sociology. Second, that crops be grown in the right soil, with the right technology, and relying on free trade so we can harvest competitive advantage to its fullest.

Another critical factor is rural property rights. Smallholders must have the ability to own the land, have access to it, and transfer it to future generations if you want a farmer to reinvest in his farm, said Page.

"Smallholders in developing countries need some degree of revenue certainty and access to a reliable market if we expect them to do what their countries really need them to do, which is raise productivity," explained Page. "Today they are often forced to sell at harvest, often below the cost of production, and lack the storage capabilities and capital to provide crops sufficiently and continuously."

Open, trust-based markets also play a key role in ensuring food security. Governments need to support trade. When Russia, Ukraine, and Argentina turned to embargos as a way to protect domestic food prices open markets were jeopardized and price volatility increased. Finally, there are very important roles for the world's governments in the creation of infrastructure that is vital to provide access to markets.

"I believe fully and completely in the world's capacity to harvest photosynthesis to feed every single person and to do it at prices that can be borne by all," concluded Page.

On March 1, the Program on Human rights welcomed David Pressman to the Stanford campus, where he spoke during the eighth installment of the Sanela Diana Jenkins Speaker Series. Pressman, the former Chief of Staff to the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, was recently appointed by Obama to serve as the first-ever Director for War Crimes and Atrocities on the National Security Council at the White House.

Drawing both from his experience as an advocate during the crisis in Darfur and from his current role as a government official, Pressman discussed the challenges of making the oft-quoted promise of  "never again" a reality. Pressman argued that the United States has begun to and must continue to adopt more proactive and preventative measures to respond to humanitarian crises as they happen.

Pressman discussed his efforts to create an established process to identify areas where diplomatic efforts of the United States could help prevent or mitigate atrocities. In such a system, the NSC would collect and compile data from NGO's and intelligence agencies to analyze indicators that could predict when and where mass atrocities are likeliest to occur. With this information, the United States could better allocate its resources and engage diplomatically with other states who may be better positioned or equipped to handle the mounting crises.

Speaking more broadly about the demands of his job, Pressman said that it is an extremely exciting time to be working in his position. He detailed the government's massive efforts to prevent the outbreak of violence in the wake of the recent referendum in Sudan, which he described as a marked shift in policy focus toward prevention from the typical reactive measures of the past. He described the recent referral of Muammi Qaddafi to the International Criminal Court as a "watershed moment" for the United States' relationship with the international community in terms of human rights enforcement.

Nevertheless, he mentioned the many areas around the world in which mass atrocities are widespread - Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, and Burma, among others -  and emphasized the need for continued progress toward a world where "never again" is more than a catch slogan.

To begin his talk, Archon Fung poses the following question: why is there no "killer" ICT platform in politics? After all, there are highly disruptive platforms in social media, commerce and other realms. These so-called "killer" platforms tend to be characterized by three features: notably that many users adopt the ICT platform and abandon the old way of doing something; the new platform improves users' experience by changing how they do some activity; and the organizations using new killer platforms displace those that do not use them.

Fung proceeds to present explanations for this puzzle, following a brief clarification of the scope of his question. When Fung refers to politics, he is not referring to aspects like partisan mobilization, e-government or the public sphere; instead, he examines the potential for ICT platforms in the realms of decision-making, problem solving and accountability. While the typical level of resolution for discussion is on the macro effects of ICT as a social force, Fung's analysis stems from his narrowing in on ICT platforms (such as Facebook, Wikipedia, Ushahidi, and others) themselves.

The first argument Fung presents in answer to his initial question is that both the suppliers and the demanders are different in politics than in other areas (e.g. commerce). Politics is aggregative, characterized by collective action and results, not focused on "individual benefits and gratification" like commerce and social interaction might be.

Second, while it is possible to have parallel, collaborative production in some types of platforms (e.g. Wikipedia), production in politics is characterized by strategic action. Various examples can help illustrate that there are key differences between commerce and politics on the supply side. In commerce, Amazon's customers want books and Amazon wants to sell books. While citizens want influence in the public sphere, however, politicians and officials typically do not want to give citizens power to influence the public sphere. Although there are counterexamples, as in some cities (such as Belo Horizonte) in Brazil, where 10% of the electorate directly influences public spending online through the Participatory Budgeting process, these cases are few and far between.

Another important factor is that there are much more ambiguous benefits in politics than in other spheres. While it is well understood that amassing more Facebook, Amazon or Google users will result in more money or fame, it is less well know what the benefits of more public deliberation or accountability might be. Since the factors that explain platform success in other areas don't translate to politics, Fung concludes, there is less innovation in the supply side.

In order to understand cases in which ICT platforms have nevertheless become important on the local level, Fung and his colleagues carried out a large case study analysis of specific examples from Brazil, Chile, Kenya, India, and Slovakia. Through analyzing these cases, which include such examples as São Paolo's Cidade Democrática, Santiago's Reclamos, Nairobi's Budget Tracking Tool and others, the researchers arrive at three key conclusions.

1. ICT platforms that have had success within the realm of politics that Fung is interested in have been characterized by the predominance of professionals and organizations among their users. The main users of Cidade Democratica, for example, are organizations and professionals.
2. Second, ICTs do not necessarily act independently. Instead, journalism and media play an important role, and even make up the main base of users for platforms like Bratislava's Fair Play Alliance and Mumbai Votes. After all, ICT can help journalists reduce research costs and represents a neutral and credible source.
3. ICT's do not go around or undermine traditional NGOs and government. Instead, at least in the cases examined, they are typically effective because they operate through these existing organizations. Kiirti in Bangalore is one example.

The bottom line from Fung's case study analysis is that getting context right can be more important for an ICT platform's success than getting the technology right. Typically, the uptake of a platform only occurs once all other pieces are in place.

In the final part of his talk, Fung addressed audience questions, many of which related to Fung's chosen standards for a killer platform. One audience member asked why Facebook could not be considered a killer platform, given its many uses for political purposes. After all, Facebook enables a kind of action to occur that would have occurred before, since it can often be accessed even in countries where public gatherings may be restricted. Another questioned why Wikileaks was not considered a killer platform. Fung replied that while Wikileaks does bring together people and information better, a killer platform would need to transform the nature of politics from group to individuals, which no existing platform has yet achieved.

Bandwidth connectivity is extremely low in many parts of the world, often delaying or even preventing people from accessing information. Although connectivity has increased by a factor of 10 or 15 over the last decade, average webpage size and number of objects has simultaneously increased by a factor of 60. This has resulted in what Subramanian terms an "unusable web"; the addition of video, audio and images has created huge web pages that take minutes or even hours to load in low connectivity worlds.

In his talk, Subramanian describes a range of techniques that he and his colleagues are developing to enhance information access in three scenarios of poor connectivity. These techniques illustrate the type of technologies being devised by a new group in Computer Science termed "Computing for Development." The focus of this group is on the design, implementation and evaluation of new computing innovations that enable global social and economic development. Since first world technology can often be a bad fit, this group instead seeks technologies that are locally appropriate, cost-effective, and easy to use.

The first low-connectivity scenario Subramanian discusses is that facing rural mobile users, who rely on low-end mobile devices and can thus only access voice and SMS services. To address the massive need for SMS services for this scenario, Subramanian and his colleagues have developed an SMS-based protocol stack for mobile applications that makes it possible to compress large quantities of information. The so-called UjU stack enables the compression of information into a 140-byte stack, while an affiliated UjU Create App interface enables anyone to create their own apps and forms. These forms are essentially turned into structured records (tables) that can be filled out and transmitted through a short message on a mobile phone. To date, UjU has already been used for microfinance applications in Mexico, mobile health data collection in India, and other applications in Ghana. Subramanian and his colleagues are also rolling out a live SMS search engine in Kenya and a data-over-GSM voice stack to support data connectivity over cellular voice.

Shared low bandwidth networks present a second low-connectivity scenario. In this scenario, an example of which might be a school where 2 Mbps of connectivity is used by 400 students, Subramanian suggests that a completely new Web architecture is needed. He and his colleagues have deployed an early version of such a system called Rural Café User Interface. Typically, a web browser sends dozens of requests when it is loading a particular page, since each site draws content from various sources and advertisers. Rather than being able to attempt to load as many windows and pages as possible, which results in even slower access, every user in Rural Café has a queue of what their search requests are. Users can search for anything at any point, but the interface acts as a planning tool by reporting how long (in seconds or minutes) the user would have to wait to load any particular site. The queue is persistent, so it doesn't change depending on how many new windows users try to open. This system is already being deployed in a few schools and universities in Kenya and India.

The third scenario is that of schools that have computer access, but no connectivity. To address this problem, Subramanian proposes the use of "vertical search engines" or contextual information portals that deliver a vertical slice of the Web in a hard-disk and provide an offline searchable and browse-able Internet. The portals are locally searchable and composed of many web-based services. Since the portals allow the user to search the local cache for the information they need rather than the URLs themselves, many local requests can be handled without browsing, supposing the local cache is strong and based on local interests and content. This is a good tool for either improving download times for people who have limited connectivity, or for enabling access for information for people without any connectivity at all. So far, the system has been piloted as an information tool for students and teachers in five schools with computers but no connectivity around Nairobi, Kenya.