With 2011 already off to such a wet start in many parts of the world, concerns of what flooding will do to food prices and availability in the coming months are starting to creep into the news. In Sri Lanka, flooding has devastated rice crops, and in North Dakota, heavy rain and snow is already threatening the spring wheat crop. And all this after last summer's Russian drought and heat wave helped drive global wheat prices higher.

But while farmers have always had to contend with the vagaries of the weather, a question of increasing importance is how agriculture will be affected by the climate changes projected to occur over the next century. Many scientists are studying which regions of the world may be impacted the most by increasing temperatures and changing precipitation regimes, and what is bound to happen to the supplies of the world's biggest cash crops, like wheat, corn, rice and soybeans.

A new report, The Food Gap, was released last week from the Universal Ecological Fund, and it has muddied the waters even further. The report reviews how global climate change will affect the fate of crop yields and food prices in 2020. Unfortunately, the report actually misinterpreted the connection between atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) and expected global temperature increases - despite the fact that recent reports from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Academy of Sciences clearly identify the most current peer-reviewed understanding of this. The food study suggests that within 9 years, average global temperatures will be an average of 2.4°C warmer than during preindustrial times - or almost 1.5°C warmer than it was just last year.

This exceptionally high temperature projection is completely baseless, as NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt explained on the RealClimate blog - it's more likely that the planet will experience this kind of temperature change over 100 years, not merely one decade. Nevertheless, a number of news outlets published stories on the report's projections of how this dramatic climate change could impact the global food supply by 2020. Some publications posted corrections to their own stories, but I thought it would be helpful to take a step back and examine climate change and food security in 2020 and beyond. I spoke with Stanford University's David Lobell, who studies how climate change affects crop yields and food prices. He helped clarify what the current research says about climate change and food security.

Read the full interview here.

An October 13 New York Times headline article warned that an increasing volatile market for grains could lead to a repeat of the 2008 food price run-up. That price spike left over 1 billion people in a state of food insecurity-a threshold symbolic in its extreme order of magnitude and in the challenges it presents for combating global hunger in the future. In a paper released December 20 in Population and Development Review FSE director Rosamond L. Naylor and deputy director Walter P. Falcon provide insight into the causes and consequences of these volatile events.

"Price variability, particularly spikes, has enormous impacts on the rural poor who spend a majority of their income on food and have minimal savings," said Naylor. "Impacts at the local level have not been well measured, yet are key to improving food security globally." 

Expectations--often faulty--have played a key role in price volatility over the past decade. Uncertain exchange rates and macro policies added to price misperceptions, as did flurries of speculative activity in organized futures markets, particularly as a result of the growing biofuels market.

"These events highlight new linkages between agriculture-energy and agriculture-finance markets that affect the world food economy today," explained Falcon. "More importantly, volatile markets compound problems of low crop productivity, increase reliance on food imports, and aggravate other internal causes of instability--conflict, weak institutions, and inadequate infrastructure--that typically plague the world's poorest countries."

To see how the rural poor were impacted on a local scale, Naylor and Falcon looked at Ghana, Uganda, Malawi, Guatemala, and India. Price changes at the local level during the 2008 price spike were frequently half that of international prices, primarily as a consequence of domestic food and trade policies.

"The price bubble was undeniably grim for poor consumers, particularly for households living under $1/day or $2/day, but not as debilitating as many commentators suggested," said Falcon. "Unfortunately, most price stabilization efforts aimed at the poor, however well intended, ended up helping larger net producers much more than those at the margin."

Additionally, domestic self-sufficiency polices tended to have long-term negative impacts on the international market when governments lacked the resources to defend a targeted price or were ‘large actors' with significant shares of global production or consumption.

For example, in the spring of 2008, the Indian government placed a ban on rice exports--a major staple in the country--when it feared significant increases in grain prices and a spread of Ug99 (wheat rust). This ban affected food prices from Asia to Africa, created mini-panics within food importing countries, and added to global grain price variability. It underscored the growing food-security and crop interdependencies among nations arising from pathogens, prices, and policies.

The extreme heat wave that hit Russia and Eastern Europe in the summer of 2010, coupled with floods in Pakistan, declining estimates of maize stocks in the U.S., and uncertainties about global GDP growth have captured the attention of many analysts and policymakers. What will happen to prices in terms of spikes, trends, and variations during 2011-2013 and beyond is uncertain.

What is known, said Naylor, is that the causes and consequences of food-price variability deserve much more attention if we are going to alleviate global food insecurity in the future.

Rosamond L. Naylor discussed the multiple challenges for achieving food security in this century‐‐ranging from economic volatility to climate change‐‐and highlighted ways in which the boundaries of analysis and action in the agricultural development community must change to address these challenges. She used a series of project and policy examples to illustrate the changes needed from international to local scales. The talk was part of a 2010 series sponsored by the SMEP Academy titled "Taking Sustainability Seriously: The Role of Knowledge Institutions".

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University has awarded six seed grants in the first round of funding from the Global Underdevelopment Action Fund. The grants are intended to jumpstart early-stage multidisciplinary research projects that tackle persistent problems of global underdevelopment. The Action Fund, which is supported by expendable gifts from FSI donors, matching funds from the Office of the President, and FSI, grew out of the Institute's spring 2010 conference on Technology, Governance, and Global Development, which featured keynote speaker Bill Gates, together with leaders from business, government, and nonprofit organizations, the media, and the academic community, to examine novel integrative approaches to poverty alleviation and human development around the world. The Action Fund projects range across disciplines, focusing primarily on problems in developing and transitioning societies. The majority of the projects have a health dimension, reflecting the degree to which poor health outcomes mirror a country's development status.

"Stanford is uniquely placed among American universities to bring cutting edge research to bear on practical problems of development.  No other institution has lower barriers to multidisciplinary work.  The Action Fund award recipients are drawn from many different parts of the university but united in their concern for promoting development," said Stephen D. Krasner,  the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, Senior Associate Dean of the Social Sciences at H&S, and deputy director of FSI.

Six multidisciplinary research teams led by Stanford faculty from across the university will receive a total of $236,000 in seed grants. The projects were selected by a faculty committee chaired by Stephen Krasner, with a focus on early-stage, multidisciplinary, policy-relevant research. All, projects are required to have a training component for Stanford undergraduate or graduate students.

The award-winning projects and their principal investigators are:

• Explaining and Improving U.S. Global Health Financing
  Eran Bendavid, assistant professor of medicine and affiliate in FSI’s Center for Health Policy. Co-investigator: Rajaie Batniji, postdoctoral fellow, Department of Medicine. With a sharp divergence between justifications for global health funding and the countries and diseases to which funding is disbursed, this study will conduct a quantitative analysis of the determinants of U.S. financing for the 171 countries receiving development assistance for health in 2009. The project seeks to identify the key drivers for U.S. global health financing by country and facilitate research on how to make global health financing work better. 
• Peasants into Democrats: Evaluating the Impact of Information on Local Governance in Mali
  James D. Fearon, professor of political science. Co-investigator and trainee: Jessica Gottlieb, PhD student in political science. Recent research suggests that enhancing voter information holds promise for increasing government accountability in new democracies. This project will undertake a field experiment in Mali, a model of an underperforming new democracy, to test the theory that information that sufficiently raises citizen voter expectations of government performance can have an important effect on governance. It will examine the impact of an intervention that provides citizens with a civics course on voter and government behavior.
  
• Effects of “Best Buy Health and Nutrition Toolkit” for Improving Educational Outcomes in Rural China
  Scott Rozelle, FSI Senior Fellow. Co-investigator and trainee: Paul H. Wise, professor of pediatrics, FSI senior fellow, and Patricia Foo, MD/PhD student, economics. Studies show high levels of anemia, nearsightedness, intestinal worms, and poor health and sanitation among children in China’s rural boarding schools. This project will measure initial health and nutrition levels of students in a randomized control setting, and deploy a set of affordable and sustainable interventions in treatment schools that includes multivitamins, eyeglasses, deworming medication, and nutrition and sanitation training. The project will then assess what works and what does not by comparing improvements in academic performance in treatment and control groups. The results of this experiment are intended to inform education and nutrition policy in China at the central and provincial levels.
  
• Controlling Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis: A Cooperative Agenda for China and North Korea
  Gary K. Schoolnik, professor of medicine and microbiology and immunology, and FSI senior fellow. Co-investigator: Sharon Perry, senior research scientist, Department of Medicine and FSI/CISAC. Rates of tuberculosis, a disease that thrives on poverty, malnutrition, and interrupted medical care, are now among the highest in the world in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea), elevating the risk of an epidemic of drug-resistant strains and a spread into China. This project represents a unique historical opportunity to examine the relationship between food security, malnutrition, and the epidemiology of tuberculosis in a present-day famine.

  
• Political Causes of Russia’s Public Health Crisis
  Kathryn Stoner, FSI senior fellow. Co-investigator: Rajaie Batniji, postdoctoral fellow, Department of Medicine. In spite of the economic advances and increases in GDP since the collapse of communism, Russia suffers from a range of dismal public health outcomes reminiscent of a much poorer country. This study seeks to understand what role political factors play in the country’s high adult mortality rate and declining life expectancy by mining World Bank and World Health Organization data and examining how Russians access healthcare services and information

  
• Factors Affecting Adoption and Ongoing Use of Improved Biomass Stoves in Karnataka and Maharashtra, India
  Frank Wolak, professor of economics and FSI senior fellow. Co-investigator: Mark C. Thurber, research scholar, FSI/Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. Burning of biomass in traditional stoves is associated with a host of ills among an estimated 2.5 billion people around the world, even though cleaner and more efficient technologies exist that could mitigate the problems. This study will examine what factors affect cooking mode choice and utilization, with the objective of developing an econometric model that is useful for efforts that encourage the adoption of improved biomass stoves. The project also seeks to offer insights on poorly understood processes of technology adoption among poor populations and to understand the magnitude of health, development, and environmental benefits that might be achievable.