Stanford University

Security

FSI scholars produce research aimed at creating a safer world and examing the consequences of security policies on institutions and society. They look at longstanding issues including nuclear nonproliferation and the conflicts between countries like North and South Korea. But their research also examines new and emerging areas that transcend traditional borders – the drug war in Mexico and expanding terrorism networks. FSI researchers look at the changing methods of warfare with a focus on biosecurity and nuclear risk. They tackle cybersecurity with an eye toward privacy concerns and explore the implications of new actors like hackers.

Along with the changing face of conflict, terrorism and crime, FSI researchers study food security. They tackle the global problems of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating knowledge and policy-relevant solutions. 

Grants support research on health care, violence and technology in poorest areas

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More than 500,000 people live in Mathare, the second-largest collection of slums in Nairobi, Kenya. Crime and disease ravage the population, and shanties have no electricity or running water. But there’s one piece of technology that everyone seems to have, one which promises to bring much-needed improvements: the cell phone.

Cell phones are central to two of the eight most recent Global Underdevelopment Action Fund projects funded by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Both projects will be led by Joshua Cohen, a professor of political science, philosophy and law and the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society.

The first of Cohen’s projects will examine whether texting private and accurate health advice will increase awareness of risky sexual behavior among Mathare’s younger residents who face high rates of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Cohen's second project involves teaching women to use mobile technology to meet up with larger groups while traveling at night, which Cohen believes can led to a decrease in the number of assaults, muggings and rapes. Eventually, the hope is that the program can be taken over by Kenya’s police and expanded.

 Cell phone charging station in Mathare

Six other projects are receiving support from the third round of Global Underdevelopment Action Fund awards, amounting to a total of $265,000.

The funds will enable multidisciplinary teams led by Stanford faculty from across the university to perform policy-relevant research focused on global underdevelopment challenges.

The funded projects will have real world impact. They will help target tuberculosis, which kills more than 1 million people a year and hinders economic development in the hardest-hit regions, like parts of India. They evaluate the amount of resources necessary to improve test scores and lower anemia rates among China’s rural schoolchildren. They ensure that health care is accessible to people in the Arab world where countries are undergoing political transitions. And they evaluate the challenges and benefits of bringing solar power to areas in Africa where electricity is a rare commodity.

As varied as the eight projects are, each will train Stanford undergraduate or graduate students, stressing the importance that Stanford and FSI place on training the next generation of researchers and policy influencers.

The projects were selected by a faculty committee chaired by Stephen D. Krasner, FSI’s deputy director and the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations.

The Action Fund is supported by FSI donors, matching funds from the Office of the President and FSI. The fund grew out of the institute’s 2010 conference on Technology, Governance, and Global Development. This year’s follow-up conference further showcased FSI’s commitment to challenges posed by global underdevelopment with a focus on food security and health.

The award-winning projects and their principal investigators are:

  • Texting for Sexual Health: Effects of Information Provision and Common Knowledge on Health-Seeking Behavior in Kenya
    Joshua Cohen
    In hopes of increasing awareness that could minimize sexual health risks, the team will promote a mobile health counseling service, which will enable young people in Nairobi’s Mathare slums to receive private and reliable answers from health counselors through text messaging.
  • Can Mobile Phones Coordinate Community Action to Improve Women’s Safety in Slums?
    Joshua Cohen
    The program uses mobile technology to measure whether the number of assaults on women will decrease if they travel in groups. The project will evaluate whether this “safety in numbers” program can be taken over by Kenyan police.
  • Crime, Violence and Governance in Latin America: Sharing Data and Building a Web-Based Research Network to Expand Knowledge
    Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar
    This project will build a systematically organized repository of research on crime, violence and citizen security in Latin America.
  • Tuberculosis Control and its Benefits to the Rural Poor
    Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert
    This study will determine the impact of improved TB control effects in India, which accounts for 20 percent of global TB incidence, and project economic outcomes from India’s TB epidemic over the next decade.
  • Paying for Performance to Improve Health in Rural China: Does Resource Scarcity Breed Innovation in Service Delivery?
    Grant Miller
    This study will evaluate whether large subsidies are necessary for improving social situations like lowering anemia rates or improving test scores.
  • Health and Political Reform in the Arab World
    Paul H. Wise
    Partnering with The Lancet journal and the American University of Beirut, the team will produce a series of articles on war, social change and health in the Arab world with a goal of improving health care in countries undergoing political transition.
  • Solar Lighting and Phone Charging in East Africa: Understanding Adoption, Business Models and Development Outcomes
    Frank Wolak
    This project will analyze new solar businesses in East Africa. Electricity is central to industry, health services and education, yet 1.5 billion people worldwide lack access. Recently, low-power solar energy sources in homes have appeared as viable options.
  • Understanding the Current Status of Medical Technology in Rural China
    Paul Yock
    This study will evaluate the use of medical technology in rural China in order to establish a baseline for future work and establish partnerships. The long-term goal is an analytical framework within which to understand the role of medical technology in Chinese health care.
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Adapting agriculture to a warmer world

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When it comes to climate change and its impacts on agriculture, we may know less than we think.

But according to David Lobell, Assistant Professor in Stanford’s Department of Environmental Earth System Science, acknowledging the gaps in our understanding could help us to more effectively prepare the world’s food system for a warmer future.

Lobell, who has built an impressive career around the study of climate change and its implications for global food security, addressed the topic of agricultural adaptation during a two-hour symposium held on the Stanford campus in early December. His presentation summarized the strengths and weaknesses of climate models in the context of global agriculture, and suggested broad strategies for preparing agriculture for climate change’s inevitable impacts.

Lobell began his talk by reaffirming some common beliefs. The Earth as a whole is unquestionably warming, he said. Precipitation intensity is increasing in high-rainfall areas, and the world’s driest regions are becoming drier.

“Think about the hottest day we currently experience in a 20-year period,” Lobell told listeners. “By mid-century, we’ll be seeing that hottest day every year, as opposed to every 20 years.” During the same period, soil moisture content in many of the world’s major agricultural areas will decrease by as much as 10 to 15 percent, while annual precipitation at the equator and high latitudes will increase by several inches per year.

At the global scale, Lobell said, climate change will have a net negative impact on existing agricultural systems. The world’s rainfed farms will become increasingly vulnerable to heat and water stress.  Growing ranges and seasons for heat-intolerant crops, such as wheat and sorghum, will contract. Although the high latitudes may see some gains from warmer temperatures and CO2 fertilization of certain crops, low-latitude regions – including South Asia and much of Africa – will suffer disproportionate yield losses as temperatures rise.

However, Lobell said that impacts aimed at local and national scales, as opposed to broad regions or the world as a whole, are much more difficult to predict. A moderate change in average rainfall across a continent could translate to drastic increases or decreases in individual countries. For example, while climate models suggest that Africa’s annual rainfall will change by less than 10 percent over the next 50 years, model projections show rainfall in the nation of Sengal changing by anywhere from five to 40 percent over the same period.

Additionally, Lobell said, forecasts of increasing climate variability are frequently overstated. “The number one misperception I hear is that climate change is going to mean more variability,” he noted.  In fact, model projections of year-to-year variability in temperature and precipitation cover a wide range. Some models do show large increases in variability over the next century – but others show a slight decrease.

Because we understand climate impacts best at the long-term and global scales, Lobell said, global responses that address long-term trends are the most likely to serve our future needs. He cautioned against approaches that prepare farmers for short-term variability, such as sudden floods or droughts, but fail to acknowledging the effects of steadily rising average temperatures. He also stressed the value of globally coordinated efforts, particularly those aimed at developing better heat and drought-tolerant crop varieties, to supplement local infrastructure projects.

 “We’re in a world where local resilience depends on global systems,” Lobell noted. He said that the interconnectedness of modern global food markets makes global trends, and global responses, increasingly relevant for local food security.

At both local and global levels, an effective response to climate change will require robust social institutions. Dr. Fatima Denton, Program Leader for Climate Change Adaptation in Africa for the Consultative Group on International Agricultural research, stressed this point in her comments on Lobell’s presentation. “Climate change has really unmasked our governance challenges and the weaknesses in our institutions,” Denton said. “This is not just about biophysical processes…it’s about the development pathways that we choose.”

Lobell agreed. Climate change, he said, presents “an important opportunity for transformation.” He encouraged present and future leaders to think critically about all aspects of the relevant science and policy. “Be skeptical of what you hear,” he advised, “and educate yourself about what we do and don’t know.”

This was the sixth talk in FSE's Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series.

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Safadi-Stanford Initiative convenes Washington policymakers

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On December 6, the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law together with the Safadi Foundation USA inaugurated the Safadi-Stanford Initiative for Policy Innovation (SSIPI) at a conference hosted by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC and supported by the Center for International Private Enterprise. This gathering convened an upwards of 100 guests to explore the conference's theme of economic reform and development in the Arab world.  

The keynote addresses were delivered by IMF Head Christine Lagarde who commented on the economic landscape in the region and suggested methods to stimulate growth for emerging Arab economics, and Lebanese Finance Minister Mohammad Safadi who stressed the importance of institution building and transparent accountable governance practices for development in the region, particularly in relation to how Arab governments handle international aid.

Safadi Scholar of the Year Katarina Uherova Hasbani presented the findings of a research study she authored on electricity sector reform in Lebanon while in residence at CDDRL this fall. The SSIPI research partnership was initiated to promote policy-relevant research on Lebanon and supported Hasbani's visiting fellowship at Stanford. Hasbani, an energy policy expert, presented her findings to the policy- making community, arguing that reliable and stable electricity supplies are a pre-condition for economic development. Hasbani cautioned that the failing electricity sector in Lebanon threatens the country's progress diverting resources from social development and education.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Tamara Wittes and Mara Rudman, Assistant Administrator for the bureau for Middle East at USAID, both commented on the development challenges and opportunities that lie in the wake of the Arab Spring. "What is happening in the region is about the people writing their own story," said Wittes. "The United States has to approach this with a sense of humility but we have a role to play because we are a major presence in the region." Rudman added that USAID is reaching out to new audience and partners in Egypt, many of whom are outside Cairo, to engage new actors after the January 25 revolution.

Miriam Allam, an economist with the OECD and Safadi Scholar first runner-up stressed the importance of public consultation and good regulation as best practices for cultivating active and democratic citizenship. Undersecretary of State for Economic, Energy, and Agricultural Affairs Robert D. Hormats, underscored the fact that economic reform must match social and political change in the region to create diverse economies that support growth, investment, and trade.

Inger Anderson, Vice-President for MENA at the World Bank, commented on the funding shortages from European countries that are resulting in decreased investment in the Arab world, when they need it the most. Both Anderson and Lagarde advocated for the reform of government subsidies, according to Lagarde, "governments need sustainable fiscal policies, including better targeted subsidies to help low-income groups."

Lagarde added that a key way forward is encouraging private sector investment to spur job creation but stressed that this requires predictability, a stable legal and tax environment, absence of corruption, and the elimination of regulatory loopholes.

Through this conference and ongoing research, the Safadi-Stanford Initiative for Policy Innovation seeks to offer new approaches and recommendations to advance development and governance practices in the region.

Transcript and video of event:

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/the-middle-the-storm-development-and-governance-the-arab-world

Speech by IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde:

http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2011/120611.htm

 

 

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Nuclear weapons' future ripe for discussion

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The supercommittee's failure to reach an agreement on debt reduction will probably result in unexpected reductions of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. That possibility concerns the defense establishment, but it also presents an opportunity: It might finally be possible to have an honest debate about the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. strategy and the prospect for further arms reductions.

Before moving ahead with this conversation, though, it is critical to review and debunk three misguided ideas about nuclear weapons.

The first is that our nuclear world is safe and stable and that all we need to do now is prevent other nations from acquiring nuclear weapons. Though it is undoubtedly true that the U.S. stockpile is safer than ever, the dangers are far from over. Nuclear terrorism remains a threat. Mistakes are possible, too. In just one example, in August 2007, six nuclear warheads disappeared for two days between North Dakota's Minot and Louisiana's Barksdale Air Force bases.

What's more, unsafe nuclear weapons elsewhere remain a major threat. Tensions between nuclear India and Pakistan, the security of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal and the future of the North Korean nuclear weapons program all suggest that the commitment to making U.S. weapons more reliable and secure will not solve the problem.

The second piece of nuclear mythology is that nuclear disarmament has never taken place and never will. Put slightly differently, it is the idea that nuclear history is proliferation history. But nuclear disarmament is far from unprecedented. South Africa, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan all disarmed. Many nuclear-capable states chose to pursue security without nuclear weapons because policymakers recognized these weapons would endanger rather than protect them. Sweden went down the nuclear path and then decided against it in the late 1960s.

Germany had a nuclear weapons program during World War II but became a law-abiding, non-nuclear member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Japan had two nuclear weapons programs during the war and accumulated a significant quantity of plutonium; since then, its authorities thought about restarting a weapons program four times but decided against it.

In each of those cases, most analysts did not believe that giving up nuclear weapons ambitions was possible. They were wrong, and today we all are glad these countries chose the path they did.

The third misguided concept is that reducing the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal will lead to proliferation. Those who believe this think that countries that no longer feel protected by U.S. nuclear weapons will start building their own to protect themselves. Although this might have some validity, it should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

Historically, many of the states that have disarmed or given up their nuclear-weapon ambitions - including every non-nuclear nation outside of NATO - have done so despite the absence of a nuclear-security guarantee.

On the other hand, states determined to get the bomb, such as the United Kingdom and France, have done so despite security guarantees. Finally, this argument assumes that the role of nuclear weapons in future alliances and geopolitical relationships will be as important as it was in the past. This might be true, but it cannot be considered a fact. It is just a bet on the future and a set of policy priorities.

In 2007, "the four horsemen" - Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William Perry and George Shultz - wrote a highly influential opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing that relying on nuclear weapons for the purpose of deterrence has become "increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective." Coming from former Cold Warriors from both sides of the political aisle, it legitimized the goal of a world without nuclear weapons and challenged the conventional wisdom.

Now policymakers in Washington and candidates on the electoral trail should embrace the issue, and begin a real conversation with the electorate about the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. policy rather than allowing that policy to be driven by inertia or budget cuts.

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Gabriela Calderón

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-2996
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CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow 2012-13
Calderon_HS.jpg PhD

Gabriela Calderon holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University. Her research interests include policies that affect gender differences in developing countries, policy evaluation, violence in Latin America and the effect of institutions and governance on the provision of public goods and health/education outcomes. She did her master's degree in economic theory and bachelor's degree in economics at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México. Currently, in the Program on Poverty and Governance, her research analyzes the way institutions and democracy affect the provision of public goods, and the impact they have on health outcomes like infant mortality trends. She is also studying the effects of government interventions that combat  drug-trafficking organizations over violence in Mexico. 

Her research has focused on the topics of development, public finance, and the evaluation of public policy programs in Mexico. For example, during the summers of 2009/2010, she conducted a field experiment in Zacatecas, Mexico with Giacomo de Giorgi, an assistant professor from Stanford University, and Jesse Cuhna, a former Stanford student. The main task was to evaluate the impact of financial literacy classes on underprivileged women entrepreneurs in the region. To successfully complete an evaluation in an untreated region, they proposed collaborating with the Mexican NGO CREA on a joint project. They contacted local interviewers, trained them, and identified all women entrepreneurs in the 17 communities, in which we conducted the experiment.  Preliminary results suggest that the female entrepreneurs who were randomly assigned to treatment earned higher profits, had larger revenues, and served a greater number of clients. They also found that they were more likely to implement formal accounting techniques.

She has also studied  programs that are not randomly assigned as an experiment. For example, she has analyzed the effects of a national policy in Mexico of child care services, called Estancias Infantiles para apoyar a Madres Trabajadoras (EI), using administrative, census and household data.  Her empirical research strategy identifies the effects of the program on both the men and women who were eligible for the program. She used time, location and eligibility variation, and considered a major threat to identification of the actual effects: for example, a manufacturer who moves into a municipality at approximately the same time as the EI program and who happens to disproportionately demand the skills of women who were eligible to the program happened to have. To ensure that such scenarios do not affect her results, she chose not triple difference strategy, in which all ineligible people are treated as “controls” for the EI-eligible families. Instead, she employs Synthetic Control Methods, using the same methodology as Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003) and Abadie, Diamond and Hainmueller (2010) to ensure that her control group has the same mix of skills and preferences as the EI-eligible group. She adapted the Synthetic Control Method to analyze repeated cross-sectional household data, which are data that are typically available in developing countries

12th National Conference on Science, Policy and the Environment: Environment & Security

The National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE) will present its 12th National Conference on Science, Policy and the Environment: Environment and Security, January 18-20, 2012 in Washington, DC.  

The Environment and Security Conference will provide a forum to explore the connections between environment and security issues, their common underlying scientific threads, and the policy and governance needed to address security risks posed by a rapidly changing environment.

The conference is expected to bring together over 1,000 attendees from the scientific, business, academic and environmental communities, as well as international, federal, and regional government officials. 

NCSE utilizes a multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral approach to covene involved scientists and decision-makers from various sectors of society. The conferences include renowned speakers, topical symposia to explore issues more in depth, and breakout workshops to develop a set of recommendations on how to advance science and connect it to policy and decision-making.

FSE director Roz Naylor will be participating in a plenary session and symposium.

The first, Integrating Climate, Energy, Food, Water, and Health includes:

Moderator: Frank Sesno, Professor and Director, School of Media and Public Affairs, The George Washington University

  • Jeff Seabright, Vice President for Environment and Water Resources, The Coca-Cola Company

  • Geoff Dabelko, Director, Environmental Change and Security Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

  • Rosamond Naylor, Director of the Center on Food Security and Environment, Stanford University

The second plenary session is on Climate Change and Food Security and includes:

Moderator: Jonathan Shrier, Acting Special Representative, Global Food Security, U.S. Department of State

  • Dr. Marc Cohen, Senior Researcher on Humanitarian Policy and Climate Change, Oxfam America
  • Dr. Rosamond "Roz" Naylor, Director of the Center on Food Security and Environment, Stanford University
  • Dr. Mark Rosegrant, Division Director, Environment and Production Technology Division, IFPRI
  • Dr. David Battisti, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences and Tamaki Endowed Chair, University of Washington

Keynote speakers include Amory Lovins, Cofounder, Chairman and Chief Scientist, Rocky Mountain Institute and Thomas Friedman, Columnist, The New York Times.

Washington DC

Rosamond L. Naylor

The Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki
Environment and Energy Building
Stanford University
473 Via Ortega, Office 363
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-5697 (650) 725-1992
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Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William Wrigley Professor of Earth System Science
Senior Fellow and Founding Director, Center on Food Security and the Environment
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Rosamond Naylor is the William Wrigley Professor in Earth System Science, a Senior Fellow at Stanford Woods Institute and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the founding Director at the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and Professor of Economics (by courtesy) at Stanford University. She received her B.A. in Economics and Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado, her M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics, and her Ph.D. in applied economics from Stanford University. Her research focuses on policies and practices to improve global food security and protect the environment on land and at sea. She works with her students in many locations around the world. She has been involved in many field-level research projects around the world and has published widely on issues related to intensive crop production, aquaculture and livestock systems, biofuels, climate change, food price volatility, and food policy analysis. In addition to her many peer-reviewed papers, Naylor has published two books on her work: The Evolving Sphere of Food Security (Naylor, ed., 2014), and The Tropical Oil Crops Revolution: Food, Farmers, Fuels, and Forests (Byerlee, Falcon, and Naylor, 2017).

She is a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, a Pew Marine Fellow, a Leopold Leadership Fellow, a Fellow of the Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics, a member of Sigma Xi, and the co-Chair of the Blue Food Assessment. Naylor serves as the President of the Board of Directors for Aspen Global Change Institute, is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for Oceana and is a member of the Forest Advisory Panel for Cargill. At Stanford, Naylor teaches courses on the World Food Economy, Human-Environment Interactions, and Food and Security. 

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David S. Battisti

Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences
University of Washington
Box 351640
Seattle WA 98195-1640

(206) 543-2019 (206) 543-0306
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David Battisti received a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences (1988) from the University of Washington. He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin until 1990. Since then, he has been on the Faculty in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington, and was the Director of JISAO from 1997-2003. Presently, he is the Tamaki Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington and Director of the University's Earth Initiative.

David Battisti's research is focused on understanding the natural variability of the climate system. He is especially interested in understanding how the interactions between the ocean, atmosphere, land and sea ice lead to variability in climate on time scales from seasonal to decades. His previous research includes coastal oceanography, the physics of the El Nino/Southern Osciallation (ENSO) phenomenon, midlatitude atmosphere/ocean variability and variability in the coupled atmosphere/sea ice system in the Arctic. Battisti is presently working to improve the El Nino models and their forecast skill, and to understand the mechanisms responsible for the drought cycles in the Sahel, and the decade-to-decade changes in the climate of the Pacific Northwest, including how the latter affects the snow pack in the Cascades and coastal ranges from Washington to Alaska. He is also working on the impacts of climate variability and climate change on food production in Mexico and Indonesia.

Battisti's recent interests are in paleoclimate: in particular, the mechanisms responsible for the remarkable "abrupt" global climate changes evident throughout the last glacial period.

Battisti has served on numerous international science panels, on Committees of the National Research Council. He served for five years as co-chair of the Science Steering Committee for the U.S. Program on Climate (US CLIVAR) and is co-author of several international science plans. He has published over 60 papers in peer-review journals in atmospheric sciences and oceanography, and twice been awarded distinguished teaching awards.

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Q&A: Stanford’s Fukuyama on European debt crisis

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European leaders converged in Brussels to figure a way out of a worsening debt crisis and agreed to greater financial oversight and centralization. England refuses to go along with the plan, and Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama says he expects some countries will start bailing out of the eurozone.

“The political difficulties of deepening any fiscal union are so great that I wouldn’t bet on that happening,” says Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellowat Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a resident at FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. “The easier path is going to be for countries to begin exiting.”

Fukuyama talks about the summit, the euro’s chances of survival and what’s at stake for America if the currency collapses.

What does the Brussels agreement mean for Europe’s debt crisis?

We will have to see how much of a binding constraint this agreement actually is. It’s just an informal agreement at this point. Political leaders can promise anything at this kind of summit and fail to deliver.

I think the most interesting thing going on is the eurozone – the 17 countries that participate in the euro – is actually splitting off from the greater EU. The reason that’s happening is that in order to save the eurozone, they need to make certain decisions on this type of deepening control. And countries like Britain will never go along with this. The 17 countries have to create their own unit that can make decisions at the expense of the larger EU.

Explain Britain’s refusal to have its budget reviewed by the European Commission

The UK is like the United States – they’ve always been jealous of their sovereignty. If you go to England and talk about crossing the Channel, they’ll say, “Oh, so you’re going to go to Europe.” While an American would say “England is a part of Europe.”

There’s a strong strain – especially within the conservative party – that really does not want to give up authority to what they regard as a bunch of French socialists in Brussels. That’s their vision of what the EU really represents. So they’re resistant about being dragged into any German scheme to deepen the powers in Brussels to include control over national budgets because that is a core element of sovereignty. The majority of people in Britain will say that will happen over their dead bodies.

What is the likelihood that countries will begin exiting the eurozone?

I don’t think it makes sense for a country like Greece to stay in the eurozone. It’s a matter of national pride that they don’t want to be the first country out, but it’s very hard to see how they actually return to growth under a system that links them to Germany in terms of the price of their currency. Long before there’s any kind of centralized fiscal reform that’s imposed on Greece, Portugal and these other peripheral countries, I think it’s more likely that they’ll exit. The euro will probably remain, but it will be at the core of the more stable countries.

What mechanism is there for countries to exit the eurozone?

There is no mechanism. Not only is there no legal way of exiting, there’s no disciplining mechanism. You have a stability pact where countries agreed they wouldn’t run a budget deficit greater than 3 percent, and Germany was really one of the first counties to violate that. But there were no sanctions. That’s the problem right now – there’s neither discipline nor an exit mechanism. That’s why everyone is fearing a disorderly, messy breakup of the EU, which would be extremely damaging.

President Obama has said the U.S. “stands ready to do our part" to help Europe resolve its crisis. What can America really do?

It’s an indication of how far we’ve fallen, but there’s really nothing concretely we can do apart from possibly increasing our International Monetary Fund share. But the IMF doesn’t have the ammunition to really help at all in this particular crisis. So all we can do is sit on the sidelines and try to get the Europeans to take our advice, which a lot of them are not inclined to do given the mess that happened on Wall Street three years ago. It’s a mark of the diminishment of overall American influence that we’re simply relegated to the sidelines of this crisis.

What’s at stake for America in the wake of a total European financial meltdown?

There’s a lot at stake. We are slowly crawling out of the biggest recession since the Great Depression. The one thing that could really send us back into a second leg of a recession is collapse of the European financial system and panic in Europe. If Europe doesn’t do well, the United States isn’t going to do well.

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Cimate Change and Agricultural Adaptation

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

Food policy makers are increasingly faced with the question of how to adapt to climate change. The increased attention on climate adaptation is partly related to the fact that greenhouse gas emissions and climate change show little sign of slowing, partly because of prospects for large sums of money devoted to adaptation, and partly because of well publicized recent weather events that have affected agricultural regions and rattled global food markets. A common and reasonable reaction from the food policy and agricultural community has been to argue that climate variations have always been a challenge to agriculture, and that climate change just makes addressing these variations more important. A logical conclusion from this perspective is to emphasize activities that help build resilience to unpredictable weather events, as well as to focus on the types of weather variables that exhibit a lot of year-to-year variability and cause the bulk of farmers’ concerns in current climate.

However reasonable as a starting point, this perspective is misguided and risks taking a challenging problem and making it even harder. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is fundamentally different from the natural variations driven by internal dynamics in the climate system. Indeed, predicting the course of climate change is less like predicting the weather next week than it is like predicting that summer will be warmer than winter. Progress in climate science has shown that the most indelible hallmarks of AGW will be increased occurrence and severity of high temperature and heavy rainfall extremes in all regions, and increased frequency and severity of drought in sub-tropical regions. Changes in the timing and amount of seasonal rainfall also appear likely in some regions, but at a much smaller pace relative to natural variability. In all of these cases, predictions from climate science are most robust at broader spatial scales, with considerable uncertainty in predicting changes for any single country.

Meanwhile, progress in crop science has shown that most crops show fairly rapid declines in productivity as temperatures rise above critical thresholds, with as much as 10 percent yield loss for +1°C of warming in some locations. Both sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia appear particularly prone to productivity losses from climate change, in part because major staples in these regions are often already grown well above their optimum temperature.

Approaches to climate adaptation should recognize these realities, and should not equate anticipating climate changes with the considerably harder task of predicting next year’s weather. Predicting and building resilience to climate variability still remain important goals for agricultural development, but adaptation efforts should balance these activities with those focused more on the specific threats presented by climate change. Heat tolerant crop varieties and strategies to deal with heavy rainfall provide two examples of important needs. Similarly, balance is needed between the local-scale efforts that attract most of adaptation investment currently, and regional and global networks to develop needed technologies. Given the greater certainty of climate changes at broader scales, as well as the positive track record of international networks for crop breeding, investments in these global systems are very likely to deliver substantial adaptation benefits. Finally, given the downward pressures that climate change will exert on smallholder farm productivity in sub-Saharan Africa, and the critical role productivity gains play in catalyzing an escape from poverty, speeding the pace of investment in African agriculture can also be viewed as a good bet for climate adaptation.

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Center on Food Security and the Environment
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David Lobell

North Korea's new course

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The legacy of the late North Korean leader Kim Il Sung's decision in the early 1990s to pursue a strategic partnership with the United States has run its course. In its place, the focus of Pyongyang's policies has decisively shifted to Beijing. However wary the North Koreans may be of their neighbor, the fact is that from Pyongyang's viewpoint, the Chinese have delivered and the United States did not.

Any shards remaining from the North's previous, decades-long effort to normalize ties with the U.S. were swept away by current leader Kim Jong Il's trip in May to China, his third in barely a year. Based on our discussions with Chinese officials, we believe that during that visit, Pyongyang and Beijing came to an understanding that, in preparation for planned, major domestic political events in 2012, both sides require sustained political stability, a convergence of interests that provides the opportunity for expanding bilateral relations beyond anything enjoyed in the past. The North is building toward a "prosperous and powerful" nation in celebration of the Kim Il Sung centenary in April; the Chinese are looking toward their 18th Party Congress scheduled for late next year. In both cases, it was apparently decided, stability on the Korean peninsula would serve economic programs and the succession of a new generation of leaders.

In the arrangements — formal and informal — that emerged from Kim Jong Il's discussions with his hosts, Pyongyang agreed not to "make trouble" (as the Chinese described it to us) in the short term, presumably meaning no deliberate military provocations, no third nuclear test and no launch of another ballistic missile. Beyond that, the talks ended in a compromise that neither side found entirely satisfactory. Kim came away with less aid and a smaller Chinese commitment of support than he had sought, though Pyongyang typically asks for more than it can get.

The North did, however, receive increased access to both Chinese capital and technology in spite ofUnited Nations and other foreign sanctions. Kim also obtained, through the establishment of joint economic zones with China along the Yalu River, a locale to test adjustments necessary to economic development, adjustments that would fall short of what Beijing considers genuine economic reform. Chinese President Hu Jintao, we were told, had to settle for Kim's promise to cause less trouble but without a North Korean commitment to serious steps toward denuclearization.

We believe that this pivot toward Beijing is no routine oscillation in North Korean policy. The drive to normalize relations with the U.S. from 1991 to 2009 had been real, sustained and rooted in Kim Il Sung's deep concern about the regime's future in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Perhaps there was no better demonstration of the North's approach in those years than the situation on Oct. 25, 2000 — the 50th anniversary of the entry of the Chinese People's Volunteers into theKorean War. Who was in Pyongyang on that date meeting Kim Jong Il? The Chinese defense minister? No, he was cooling his heels while Kim met with the U.S. secretary of State. That was no accident of scheduling on Pyongyang's part; it would not happen again today.

If the paradigm shift is real, we expect the North in the near to medium term to make far less overt trouble. Less tension on the Korean peninsula? What could be wrong with that? Nothing, as long as it is understood that such tranquillity will also provide a veil for the North's continuing pursuit of nuclear weapons and increasingly sophisticated delivery systems. With the onset of stability and growing Chinese-North Korean cooperation, Pyongyang may well calculate that the outside world's focus on the North Korean nuclear program will become diffuse. Indeed, the North Koreans have long assumed that given enough time, the world would resign itself to their nuclear weapons, as happened with India and Pakistan.

To help things along, it isn't out of the question that Pyongyang might even agree to some U.S. efforts to contain the nuclear program through a series of what Washington calls "pre-steps." The North has repeatedly expressed willingness to consider discussion of its uranium enrichment program and moratoriums on missile and nuclear tests. As unilateral actions, these would have short-term benefits by further stabilizing the situation to provide additional room for discussions. But in the absence of long, serious negotiations between the two sides, they will turn out to be no more meaningful than the ill-considered agreements of the now moribund six-party talks.

All of which brings us back to the deepening North Korean-Chinese ties, and the downgrading in Pyongyang's calculations of relations with the United States. There was considerable momentum behind the North's strategy for engaging the U.S. in past negotiations. That is no longer the case, with consequences we have only started to feel.

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Robert Carlin
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