When Siyan Yi was a medical student in Cambodia 12 years ago, he volunteered with a collaborative government-NGO project to provide young women at high risk for HIV/AIDS—the victims of sexual exploitation—with housing, vocational training, medical care, and psychological support. Cambodia at that time had one of Asia’s highest HIV-infection rates.

That rate has dropped by half, thanks to government policy measures, international NGO support, and the efforts of medical professionals like Yi. Cambodia’s government must now find ways to curb HIV infection in new segments of the population, says Yi, who is the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center’s inaugural Developing Asia Health Policy Fellow. Sustaining funding for the long-term care of HIV-infected individuals also poses a future challenge, he explains, and new health issues associated with development are beginning to crop up.

Cambodia’s first HIV case was detected in 1991 in a blood donor, and the rate of HIV/AIDS increased dramatically throughout the decade. HIV/AIDS hit Thailand slightly earlier, and was spread through the commercial sex trade. The epidemic reached an even greater scale there than it ever did in Cambodia.

Thailand’s government struck back with a 100-percent condom use promotion program, which Cambodia successfully adopted in the late 1990s. Brothels are illegal in Cambodia, but the government worked cooperatively with owners to provide basic HIV/AIDS education to sex workers. These efforts significantly reduced the transmission of HIV.

Since then, a more indirect form of prostitution has sprung up in places such as karaoke halls, massage parlors, restaurants, and even in factories. HIV prevalence remains high among some sentinel groups such as female sex workers, beer promoters, men who have sex with men (MSM), injected-drug users, and migrant workers.

Yi advocates that the government expand the scope of its HIV/AIDS prevention programs to encompass these new at-risk populations. He even suggests that the government consider creating a system of licensed brothels such as previously existed in Hong Kong and Taiwan. “It would provide the government with an easier means of controlling prostitution, and allow it to work with brothel owners to control HIV-infection rates,” states Yi.

HIV increases the risk of contracting or developing symptoms of tuberculosis; a large proportion of Cambodia’s population carries the disease but shows no signs of it. Tuberculosis went largely undetected during the decades of the Khmer Rouge regime, but with the advent of HIV/AIDS it has become more prevalent. Yi has been involved in government-NGO projects to provide tuberculosis screening for HIV patients, including a tuberculosis control project with the Japan International Cooperation Agency.

Tuberculosis screening and HIV treatment advances may greatly prolong the life—and even improve the health—of patients. But heartening as Cambodia’s success against HIV/AIDS has proven in the past decade, the government largely bears the responsibility for funding the expensive treatment and care for the low-income individuals most affected by it. A critical portion of government funding for its HIV/AIDS prevention programs comes from external organizations. 

“I think that the main issue for the government of Cambodia in the battle against HIV and AIDS is financial sustainability,” says Yi, who worries that donor agencies will withdraw support as the HIV-infection rate continues to improve. Prevention is less expensive, he explains, but long-term care is costly to a developing country such as Cambodia.

Yi, however, feels less concerned now about the HIV/AIDS epidemic and speaks hopefully of working to help the government find ways to measure and treat non-communicable diseases associated with economic development, such as diabetes and hypertension. While he is at Stanford, he will collaborate with Asia Health Policy Program researchers to move his work toward solving Cambodia’s new health challenges.

Blaming leaders in America and abroad for not doing enough to combat climate change, former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said continued failure to tackle the problem will result in worldwide hunger, social unrest and political turmoil.

“Without action at the global level to address climate change, we will see farmers across Africa – and in many other parts of the world including here in America – forced to leave their land,” the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize winner told a crowd of about 1,400 people at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium on Thursday. “The result will be mass migration, growing food shortages, loss of social cohesion and even political instability.”

Citing numbers from the World Bank, Annan said rapidly rising food prices since 2010 have “pushed an additional 70 million people into extreme poverty.” He called a lack of food security for nearly 1 billion of the world’s population “an unconscionable moral failing” that is also a stumbling block to a strong international economy.

“It affects everything from the health of an unborn child to economic growth,” he said.

Annan’s talk, “Food Security Is a Global Challenge,” was delivered as part of a daylong conference on global underdevelopment sponsored by Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. The event drew the world’s leading experts in the field and featured panel discussions that explored the connections between global security and food supplies, health care and governance. Keynote speeches were delivered by Annan and Jeff Raikes, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates also planned to deliver a talk to a private audience.

The conference marked the launch of FSI’s Center on Food Security and the Environment.

“With this facility, and the creative thinkers and inquisitive minds for which Stanford is famous, you are well-equipped to undertake research which advances our knowledge and helps to shape our response to the many global challenges we face,” Annan said. “And with the resources at your disposal, you also have the capacity to actively engage to influence policy, implement solutions and thus improve the lives of the most vulnerable people on the planet.”

Annan also lauded government initiatives such as America’s Feed the Future program that focus on alleviating global hunger. He recently met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Raj Shah, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, to discuss ways to address food insecurity.

“If we pool our efforts and resources, we can finally break the back of this problem,” he said.

But he challenged wealthier nations to do more than pay lip service to the problem.

“We need to make sure that promises of extra support from richer countries are kept and involve fresh funds rather than the repackaging of existing financial commitments,” he said.

Annan, who is the chair of the Kofi Annan Foundation, the Africa Progress Panel, and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, said Africa represents both the greatest problem and the greatest promise when it comes to food security.

The continent is home to 60 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land, but cannot produce enough food to feed its own people, he said. But if Africa can grow just half the world’s average yield of staple crops like wheat, corn and rice, it would end up with a food surplus.

Transforming Africa into one of the world’s biggest crop producers will take more than supporting farmers, he said. It entails sound environmental stewardship.

 “I hope this is an area where the Center on Food Security and the Environment can make a major contribution to finding solutions,” Annan said.

Without those solutions, the future is bleak.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, where global warming brings the threat of persistent drought, current crop production is expected to be cut in half by the end of the century and 8 percent of the region’s fertile land is expected to dry up.

“Those arguing, here and elsewhere, for urgent action and a focus on opportunities to green our economies still find themselves drowned out by those with short-term and vested interests,” Annan said. “This lack of long-term collective vision and leadership is inexcusable. It has global repercussions, and it will be those least responsible for climate change – the poorest and most vulnerable – that will pay the highest price.”

Annan's speech was sponsored by FSI, Stanford in Government and the Stanford University Speakers Bureau.

Throughout the developing world, people are dying at alarming rates because they don't have basic necessities we often take for granted: enough food, clean water and health care.

Political instability and weak institutions are often to blame. Corruption, violence and lack of accountability keep the world’s poorest people from the chance to prosper.

Even as countries like China and India revel in their economic booms, the gap between rich and poor in those countries has never been wider. And those left behind often struggle on less than a dollar a day.

Researchers at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies are focusing on how to improve the quality of lives for those in the greatest need – the people caught in places of chronic underdevelopment.

“Our job is to take intellectual ideas and push them out into the real world where they can be tested and refined – or discarded. The impact of that can be transformational."

-Coit BlackerThey're helping children in rural China get the food they need to do well in school and land competitive jobs. They’re using cell phone technology to make sure people living in one of Africa’s largest slums have access to clean drinking water. They’re working with local governments in Latin America to improve medical care and educational opportunities for children.

FSI: Where disciplines come together

The success they have in fighting poverty takes more than a lone researcher focusing on a particular topic. It comes from economists working with doctors, political scientists collaborating with environmentalists and engineers sharing ideas with lawyers. And it comes from putting academic findings into the hands of policy makers.

As Stanford’s primary forum for research on international issues, FSI fosters the multidisciplinary match-ups that influence policy worldwide and make a difference in people’s lives. It provides the glue and the space for academics across Stanford’s campus to come together and develop ideas.

“Unless and until we can offer profound answers as to why such a large a portion of the world’s population lives on less than a dollar day, we won’t be able to help countries develop institutions for reliable self-governance,” says FSI Director Coit D. Blacker. “And we won’t have building blocks for stability in place. If you can’t feed your people, you can’t educate your people and you can’t sew together a social and governing structure to help them break from chronic underdevelopment.”

Action Fund grants: Sparking research, shaping policy

FSI’s Global Underdevelopment Action Fund provides seed grants to help faculty members design research experiments and conduct fieldwork in some of the world’s poorest places.

The program awards up to $40,000 to researchers creating projects that tackle issues like hunger, poverty and poor governance.  Since it was established last year, the Action Fund has awarded $436,000 to nine researchers who have designed at total of 11 programs. 

With fresh findings, FSI researchers are in a unique position to influence global policy. Drawing on the FSI’s network of faculty and alumni who came from and are now working with governments around the world, scholars have the opportunity to direct their research to those who are able to affect change.

“Our job is to take intellectual ideas and push them out into the real world where they can be tested and refined – or discarded,” Blacker says. “The impact of that can be transformational.”

Despite an increase in food production and incomes worldwide, one in seven of the world’s 7 billion people is hungry.

Upheavals in food prices and the global economy, combined with a growing population’s demands for food and energy, are widening the gap between rich and poor. And that rift is creating new challenges to feed the hungry – most of whom live in remote, rural areas – without depleting the planet’s natural resources.

Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) is dedicated to addressing these challenges. Started as a research program in 2006, FSE is celebrating its launch today as a full-scale research center. The celebration is part of a larger conference hosted by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) focused on links between international security, food and health care. The institutional elevation signifies the growing importance of food security issues at Stanford and worldwide. And it positions FSE to become the leading academic institution in the field of food security.

“Food security has quickly risen as a critical global issue comparable to international security, global health, and democratization, and will remain a pressing issue in the years head,” said Rosamond L. Naylor, director of FSE. “We’re looking at how to raise people out of poverty so they can afford more food, how to stabilize prices so food isn’t too expensive, and how to grow more food without destroying the environment.”

In an introduction given at FSE’s Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series last winter, Stanford President John Hennessy remarked, “Stanford was founded on the idea that its teaching and research could have a broader impact on society, and the area of food security certainly has that kind of possibility.”

“Our work on hunger, rural poverty, and the environmental impact of food production is critical not only to the future of our lives here in the United States but to the lives of people around the world,” said Hennessey. “We will need to bring together teams of experts from different disciplines if we are going to make important contributions to this work.”

FSE’s dual affiliation with the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Woods Institute for the Environment supports these collaborations, and is a key factor to the center’s expansion. The center is led by Naylor and its deputy director, Walter P. Falcon. Both share a long history at Stanford studying international agricultural economics.

Naylor received her PhD from Stanford’s Food Research Institute in 1989, and is now a professor in the department of Environmental Earth System Science. Her interdisciplinary approach to teaching has resulted in popular courses such as the World Food Economy (which she co-teaches with Falcon,) and Human Society and Environmental Change. Naylor was appointed the William Wrigley Senior Fellowship in 2008 in recognition of her multidisciplinary, cutting-edge research and long-term commitment to combating global hunger and environmental degradation.

Falcon, the Helen Farnsworth Professor of Agricultural Policy, Emeritus, served as the director of Stanford’s Food Research Institute from 1972 to 1991. Falcon’s leadership role continued as FSI’s director from 1991 to 1998. Between 1998 and 2007, he co-directed the Center for Environmental Science and Policy out of which grew the Program on Food Security and the Environment.

FSE is now engaged in over 15 major projects with $11.5 million in grant and program funding under management. Productive food systems and their environmental consequences comprise the core of the Center’s research portfolio.

“Roz Naylor and Wally Falcon have worked tirelessly to promote the center’s mission and to secure the funding needed to support the center’s growth,” said FSI Director Coit D. Blacker. “It is gratifying to see FSE’s research and scholarly agendas receiving a resounding vote of confidence from the University as well as some of the world’s leading foundations, agencies and individual donors.”