Ten undergraduates recently received the 2011 Deans' Award for Academic Accomplishment, which honors extraordinary undergraduate students for "exceptional, tangible" intellectual achievements. Among them: CISAC honors student Anand Habib, a senior majoring in biology with honors in international security studies. He is completing an honors thesis focusing on health governance.

Habib sees his work as an intentional synthesis of scholarship and larger social commitments. He has lived this out in many ways at Stanford, including working on behalf of politically and medically disenfranchised people in India, Mexico and Guatemala. On campus, he has turned the Stanford tradition of the annual Dance Marathon into a vehicle dedicated to addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic by engaging not only Stanford students but also local communities and corporations, raising more than $100,000. His exceptional work was recognized by his participation in the Clinton Global Initiative University Conference in April.

English Associate Professor Michele Elam described Habib as a "superb critical thinker" whose work is characterized by "creative genius" and "mature insights." She holds him up as a model for others, saying that "he exemplifies exactly the kind of deeply informed, pragmatic and caring leadership that the world needs and Stanford enables."

The Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) hosted a conference on the democratic transition in Egypt on Friday as part of its Program on Arab Reform and Democracy.

A series of four panels explored a number of issues surrounding the transition to democracy following the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak. Prominent scholars from Stanford and other institutions participated in the conference.

Twelve Egypt scholars from American, Egyptian and European universities and think tanks convened in four panels throughout the day to discuss the revolution, the transition process, the changing political landscape and Egypt's future. The conference was co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

Panelists included Hoover Institution senior fellow Larry Diamond, history professor Joel Beinin, political science assistant professor Lisa Blaydes, CDDRL visiting scholar Ben Rowswell and CDDRL Program Manager Lina Khatib. They were joined by academics from Kent State University, Harvard University, Georgetown University, the University of Texas, Notre Dame University, the University of Exeter, the American University in Cairo and the Brookings Doha Center.

Each panel featured an introduction by the chair, followed by two or three 30-minute talks by panelists and a 30-minute Q&A session.

Emad Shahin, an associate professor of religion, conflict and peacebuilding at Notre Dame, opened the first panel with a talk that emphasized the role of the youth in charging the 18 days of protest that toppled former President Hosni Mubarak.

"In 18 days, this movement dismantled three pillars of Mubarak's regime-the security apparatus, NDP [National Democratic Party] and...the military," he said.

Samer Shehata, an assistant professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University, discussed the response of the regime to the protests and the reasons for its failure.

The second panel looked to the future, focusing on the Egyptian presidential elections scheduled for later this year. Speeches addressed the process of negotiations between the regime and opposition groups, the agenda for constitutional and institutional reform and political repression.

Panelist Jason Brownlee, an associate professor in the Department of Government at University of Texas at Austin, drew a parallel between the current situation in Egypt and the one in Russia in 1991. He described the liberal movement as "electorally weak" and said it experienced difficulty in maintaining momentum.

The third panel addressed political parties in the post-revolution landscape, including the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood party. Panelist Hesham Sallam, a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University, spoke on how the timeline for the parliamentary elections, currently set for this September, disadvantages newly formed parties and favors parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

"The speed of transition in Egypt  gives advantage to existing political parties by not allowing time for newcomers to organize," he said.

"The Brotherhood knows how to play politics where liberals have absolutely no idea," added Shadi Hamid, the director of research at the Brookings Doha Center.

Diamond described parallels with the situation in Iraq in 2004 and 2005.

"The liberals weren't good at organizing, had no mass constituency and got electorally crushed...but they had a constructive influence on the constitution making process," he said.

"We should look at this as an iterative process of several elections to come," he added.

The final panel focused on looking forward. Rowswell presented a new "Open Source Democracy Promotion" project, designed to provide Egyptian activists with an option for crowd sourcing constitutional negotiations.

"The best approach is for informed and engaged citizens to support the Egyptian activists...inspired by the opportunity Egyptians have given themselves but also inspired by what Egyptians have given the world regarding democratic state building and ushering in a new age of democracy based on mutual collaboration and participation," Rowswell said.

Hamid delivered the final talk of the conference, presenting his forecast for the parliamentary elections. He singled out newly formed parties backed by wealthy individuals as key players in the upcoming vote.

"The established political parties will do quite well, but also individuals with name recognition in their districts and those with resources will do well," he said.

Hamid cautioned against overly idealistic projections, given the disorganization of the liberal parties in Egypt.

"We have to be realistic," he said. "We wanted to think for a long time that once there was democracy, Egyptians would become fluffy American-style liberals, and we don't know if that is true."

"From the perspective of international actors doing democracy promotion, I think there's a distinction between encouraging Egyptians to make one choice over another," Rowswell said. "I think it should be ensuring that there is a choice to make."

Policy brief: Climate trend and global crop production since 1980

Global warming is likely already taking a toll on world wheat and corn production, according to a new study led by Stanford University researchers. But the United States, Canada and northern Mexico have largely escaped the trend.

"It appears as if farmers in North America got a pass on the first round of global warming," said David Lobell, an assistant professor of environmental Earth system science and center fellow at the Program on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University. "That was surprising, given how fast we see weather has been changing in agricultural areas around the world as a whole."

Lobell and his colleagues examined temperature and precipitation records since 1980 for major crop-growing countries in the places and times of year when crops are grown. They then used crop models to estimate what worldwide crop yields would have been had temperature and precipitation had typical fluctuations around 1980 levels.

The researchers found that global wheat production was 5.5 percent lower than it would have been had the climate remained stable, and global corn production was lower by almost 4 percent. Global rice and soybean production were not significantly affected.

The United States, which is the world's largest producer of soybeans and corn, accounting for roughly 40 percent of global production, experienced a very slight cooling trend and no significant production impacts.

Outside of North America, most major producing countries were found to have experienced some decline in wheat and corn (or maize) yields related to the rise in global temperature. "Yields in most countries are still going up, but not as fast as we estimate they would be without climate trends," Lobell said.

Lobell is the lead author of the paper, Climate Trends and Global Crop Production Since 1980, published May 5 online in Science Express.

Russia, India and France suffered the greatest drops in wheat production relative to what might have been with no global warming. The largest comparative losses in corn production were seen in China and Brazil.

Total worldwide relative losses of the two crops equal the annual production of corn in Mexico and wheat in France. Together, the four crops in the study constitute approximately 75 percent of the calories that humans worldwide consume, directly or indirectly through livestock, according to research cited in the study.

"Given the relatively small temperature trends in the U.S. Corn Belt, it shouldn't be surprising if complacency or even skepticism about global warming has set in, but this study suggests that would be misguided," Lobell said.

Since 1950, the average global temperature has increased at a rate of roughly 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade. But over the next two to three decades average global temperature is expected to rise approximately 50 percent faster than that, according to the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. With that rate of temperature change, it is unlikely that the crop-growing regions of the United States will continue to escape the rising temperatures, Lobell said.

"The climate science is still unclear about why summers in the Corn Belt haven't been warming. But most explanations suggest that warming in the future is just as likely there as elsewhere in the world," Lobell said.

"In other words, farmers in the Corn Belt seem to have been lucky so far."

This is the first study to come up with a global estimate for the past 30 years of what has been happening, Lobell said.

To develop their estimates, the researchers used publicly available global data sets from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and from the University of Delaware, University of Wisconsin, and McGill University.

The researchers also estimated the economic effects of the changes in crop yield using models of commodity markets.

"We found that since 1980, the effects of climate change on crop yields have caused an increase of approximately 20 percent in global market prices," said Wolfram Schlenker, an economist at Columbia University and a coauthor of the paper in Science.

He said if the beneficial effects of higher carbon dioxide levels on crop growth are factored into the calculation, the increase drops down to 5 percent.

"Five percent sounds small until you realize that at current prices world production of these four crops are together worth nearly $1 trillion per year," Schlenker said. "So a price increase of 5 percent implies roughly $50 billion per year more spent on food."

Rising commodity prices have so far benefited American farmers, Lobell and Schlenker said, because they haven't suffered the relative declines in crop yield that the rest of the world has been experiencing.

"It will be interesting to see what happens over the next decade in North America," Lobell said. "But to me the key message is not necessarily the specifics of each country. I think the real take-home message is that climate change is not just about the future, but that it is affecting agriculture now. Accordingly, efforts to adapt agriculture such as by developing more heat- and drought-tolerant crops will have big payoffs, even today. "

Justin Costa-Roberts, an undergraduate student at Stanford, is also a coauthor of the Science paper. David Lobell is a researcher in Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment, a joint program of Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Schlenker is an assistant professor at the School of International and Public Affairs and at the Department of Economics at Columbia.

The work was supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

"Most of the people in the world are poor, so if we knew the economics of being poor, we would know much of the economics that really matters. Most of the world's poor people earn their living from agriculture, so if we knew the economics of agriculture, we would know much of the economics of being poor." - Theodore W. Schultz, accepting the Nobel Prize in Economics, December 8, 1979           

More than thirty years ago, Theodore W. Schultz won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on economic development and agriculture in developing countries. Last week, Cornell University Professor Christopher Barrett told Stanford students, faculty, and community members that Schultz's ideas suggest a powerful approach to breaking persistent cycles of poverty in modern rural Africa.

Barrett, a Professor of Applied Economics and Management and an expert in poverty and international development, visited the Stanford campus for a two-hour symposium entitled "Assisting the Escape from Persistent Ultra-Poverty in Rural Africa." He described the economics of poverty and agriculture in rural Africa as a series of downward spirals in environmental and human health.

The struggle to survive on insufficient resources, he explained, leads to disease and degradation that result in still deeper poverty. Escaping this cycle requires an influx of assets - a "lump of starting capital" in both private and public goods - that Barrett said the international community can provide.

"It takes money to make money," Barrett said. "Asset holdings, and their productivity through technology and markets, matter enormously."

When African farmers and pastoralists slip below a certain threshold of asset poverty, Barrett explained, they face negative feedbacks that set off a steep decline.

For example, a farmer who cultivates the same tiny plot of land year after year depletes soil nutrients to the point where even heavy fertilizer applications cannot revive the crop. Similarly, a pastoral family that begins with a small herd may become sedentary if they are unable to provide for the elderly and infirm while keeping their animals on the move. Stuck in one place, the herd exhausts local resources, and animals and humans alike suffer the health consequences of insufficient food and water.

A farmer who begins with plenty of land can sustain higher yields and invest surplus profits in education, health care, better equipment and still more land. But for the small farmer, incentives to invest in a better future are low, because the consequences of losing even a little income - an accelerated decline toward deeper poverty - are so severe.

Subsistence activity takes precedence, and when bad weather or disease strikes, the results are devastating. Limited access to credit, technology, and markets; weak government; and a harsh physical landscape make it still more difficult for rural Africans to invest in productive assets and recover from chance shocks.

These negative feedbacks and perverse incentives, Barrett said, make African poverty uniquely persistent.

While poor families in the developed world usually experience brief deprivation as a result of job loss or another isolated event, ultra-poor families in rural Africa have exhausted their land, livestock, and other productive assets. Without the means to restore natural and human capital, they may face a lifetime of poverty.

"In the US, poverty, while distressingly widespread, is a short-term phenomenon," Barrett noted. ""It is qualitatively and ethically different to talk about people who have very little hope of leaving poverty."

But Barrett said that the next generation of rural Africans has reason to be hopeful. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach, targeted investment could improve the outlook for many poor African nations. Barrett cited a generation of successful poverty relief efforts in Asia, where ultra-poverty rates in some countries have fallen from the high teens to less than five percent.

"East and Southeast Asia were at least as grim a generation ago as Africa is today," Barrett emphasized. "We know from the historical record that the world can move a lot of people out of poverty very quickly."

Citing Schultz's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Barrett suggested that the international community focus first on reversing the cycles of decline that have pushed so many African farmers into meager subsistence agriculture.

Farm output, he said, universally impacts the rural poor. When output increases, poor farmers gain directly by selling their surplus. The extra supply also keeps local food prices low, benefiting the vast majority of rural Africans who consume more food than they produce.

Barrett described several possible "entry points" to stimulate agricultural productivity, including direct land and livestock grants, organized provision of rural education and health care, and renewed commitment to African crop research.

Private entrepreneurs, he said, are particularly well situated to invest in the technology and infrastructure needed to open rural markets, support soil and water conservation, and improve communication between buyers and sellers.

Barrett said that relief efforts should ultimately turn their attention to moving rural Africans out of agriculture. High rural population densities have compressed average farm sizes to a fraction of a hectare, he explained, making farming an unsustainable enterprise. More and more rural Africans are suffering the consequences of trying to do too much with too little.

"They find farming hard work," Barrett said, "and they'd like their kids to be able to find something else to do."

Barrett already sees a brighter future for those farmers and their children. "With governments and private investors already increasing their commitments to agriculture and rural development in Africa," he said, "I firmly believe we are in the early stages of being on the way."

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