FSE director Roz Naylor participated in the lead plenary session integrating climate, energy, food, water, and health at the 12th National Conference on Science, Policy and the Environment. The theme of this year's conference was Environment and Security, and included keynote talks delivered by Amory Lovins and Thomas Freedman.

While many of us here in the US wake up concerned about political, economic, and military unrest at home and abroad, billions still wake up with more basic, human security concerns, opened FSE director Rosamond L. Naylor in a plenary connecting climate, energy, food, water, and health.

Are we going to have enough to eat today? How am I going to feed my family or care for family members struggling with HIV/AIDS and other infectious diesease? Is there enough water to drink, bathe, and still water my crops?

Naylor emphasized the need to bring these human security issues back into the forefront of our global conscious. While these are 'humanitarian needs at the core', they are also related to national and international security.

"When people are desperate enough, and we've seen this particularly with the food price spike in recent years, they take to the streets, and sometimes when they take to the streets they realize they are disgruntled about a number of things in addition to food prices," said Naylor.

The Arab Spring and wave of rebellions throughout the Middle East last year demonstrate the connections between food security, unmet basic needs, and national security. It has been a chaotic time for world food markets, said Naylor.

Naylor's global statistics are discouraging. Over a billion people still suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition, 1/5 don't have physical access to water, and roughly 1.6 billion are facing economic water constraints (do not have the economic resources to access available water). Food and water insecurity are exacerbating the incidence and transmission of infectious disease.

At a time when investment is sorely needed, the Hill has been making dramatic cutbacks in foreign assistance and foreign investment is falling short. Efforts made by the private sector, philanthropy, and civil society, while valuable, remain siloed. Opportunties are being missed by not addressing the interrelated nature of food and health issues.

Despite this dire outlook, Naylor offered solutions to help us rethink our development strategy.

1. Invest in more diversified and nutritious crops that have more climate adaptation potential.
2. Consider new irrigation strategies, particularly in areas like Africa where 96% of the continent is still not irrigated. Not large dams, but small, distributed irrigation systems that rely on solar and wind.
3. Integrate food and health programs and the way we think about domestic and productive water uses.

Naylor was joined on the panel by Jeff Seabright (Vice President, The Coca-Cola Company), Daniel Gerstein (Deputy Under Secretary for Science and Technology, U.S. Department of Homeland Security), and Geoff Dabelko (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars). The panel was moderated by Frank Sesno (George Washington University and Planet Forward). Video of the plenary can be found below:

On January 17, Stanford CISAC and the Woods Institute for the Environment co-sponsored a daylong conference that examined the relationship between security and the environment.

The event brought together political scientists, physicists, historians, biologists and others from across the university, and focused on how climate change might affect political stability, the role of international agreements in protecting the environment, food security and freshwater, ocean and other resource conflicts.

The goal of the event, said CISAC Co-director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, was to start a dialogue about the potential relationships between security and the environment, with the expectation that it would lead to future research projects and collaborations, and ultimately to policy recommendations.

In addition to Cuéllar, participants included Woods Co-directors Jeffrey R. Koseff and Barton H. Thompson, David Holloway, Katherine D. Marvel, Kenneth A. Schultz, David Lobell, Kaitlin Shilling, Meg Caldwell, Lynn Eden, Toshihiro Higuchi and Walter P. Falcon.

 

In Kenya, 11 million people suffer from malnourishment. Twenty percent of children younger than five are underweight, and nearly one in three are below normal height. In a typical day, the average Kenyan consumes barely half as many calories as the average American.

But Kenya – and other underfed countries throughout Sub-Saharan Africa – have more than enough land to grow the food needed for their hungry populations.

The juxtaposition of food deprivation and land abundance boils down to a failure of national agriculture policies, says Thom Jayne, professor of international development at Michigan State University. Governments haven’t helped small farmers acquire rights to uncultivated land or use the land they own more productively, he said.

Speaking earlier this month at a symposium organized by the Center on Food Security and the Environment, Jayne said lifting African farmers out of poverty will require a new development approach.

The focus, he said, should be on increasing smallholder output and putting idle land to work in the hands of the rural poor.

Much of Sub-Saharan Africa’s fertile land, Jayne explained, falls under the ownership of state governments or wealthy investors who leave large tracts of land unplanted.

Meanwhile, population density in many rural areas exceeds the estimated carrying capacity for rainfed agriculture – approximately 500 persons per square kilometer, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Above this density threshold, farm sizes become so small, farming becomes economically unsustainable.

“As farm size shrinks, it’s increasingly difficult to produce a surplus,” Jayne said. “As it’s difficult to produce a surplus, it becomes difficult to finance investments in fertilizer and other inputs that could help you intensify.”

Agricultural development policies, Jayne said, have exacerbated these problems. One Zambian fertilizer subsidy program, for example, delivered support payments to over 50 percent of farms greater than five hectares in size – but only reached 14 percent of farmers whose holdings measured one hectare or smaller.

“This was a poverty reduction program that was targeted to large farms,” Jayne said. “Where’re the allocations to R&D appropriate to one hectare farms, tsetse fly control, vet services, all the things that are going to make that one hectare farm more productive?”

He stressed that investments in small farms could reduce poverty.

“Fifty to seventy percent of the population in these countries is engaged in agriculture,” he said. “There aren’t very many levers to reduce poverty and get growth processes going except to focus on the activities that that fifty to seventy percent are primarily engaged in.”

Smallholder-based growth strategies delivered stunning results in Green Revolution-era India – while large-farm strategies in Latin American countries have largely failed to alleviate rural poverty, he said.

Symposium commentator Byerlee, a rural policy expert and former lead economist for the World Bank, agreed with Jayne. In particular, Byerlee expressed skepticism about the benefit of large land investments by foreign agricultural interests.

“The social impacts aren’t going to be very much,” he said of the large-scale mechanized farming operations favored by foreign investors.

“They don’t create many jobs,” he said. “That’s really what we should be focusing on in terms of poverty reduction – job creation.”

Byerlee also stressed the need to formalize Sub-Saharan Africa’s land tenure systems. Currently, he said, about eighty percent of Africa’s land is titled informally under “customary” rights.

“When you have this population pressure, and on top of that you have commercial pressures coming in from investors, this system is just not going to stand up,” he said. “If you had better functioning land markets, it could reduce the transaction costs for investors, allow smallholders to access land, and provide an exit strategy for people at the bottom end.”

Jayne suggested reforms and new policies should include mechanisms to help small farmers gain access to unused fertile land. He called for comprehensive audits of land resources in Sub-Saharan African nations, a tax on uncultivated arable acreage, and a transparent public auction to distribute idle state lands to small farmers.

Additionally, he said, governments can help by improving infrastructure in remote rural areas and clearing fertile land of pests – such as tsetse flies – that threaten crops and human health.

But whatever particular policies they choose to pursue, Jayne said, African governments cannot afford to ignore the problems associated with inequitable land distribution and low smallholder agricultural productivity and. Failure to implement broad-based, smallholder-focused growth strategies will result in “major missed opportunities to reduce poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa,” he said.

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

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.

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.