Tannis Thorlakson, a first-year PhD candidate in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) in Stanford's School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Science, has won a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to support coursework and research on the palm oil industry in Indonesia. Thorlakson's proposed project, "Is Certification Enough? The socio-economic and environmental impacts of certified palm oil in Indonesia," was one of 2,000 awards selected from a pool of 16,000 applications. 

Thorlakson's research interests include the interactions between farmers and the firms that buy their produce, as well as how firms' supply chain sourcing strategies impact socio-economic and environmental outcomes in the agriculture sector. 

"I am thrilled, though not surprised, that the NSF selected Tannis for this prestigious award," said Professor Roz Naylor, one of Thorlakson's faculty advisors. "Her research on how multinational companies can make palm oil and other major agricultural commodities more environmentally sustainable is important and timely. It is a welcome addition to the work being done by many at Stanford to tackle the big social, economic and environmental questions about the fast-growing palm oil sector."

Thorlakson will spend the summer of 2015 in Cape Town, South Africa, working with a food retailer to understand the impacts of the company's sustainability initiative on the farmers in the retailers supply chain. 

A new statistical model developed by Stanford researcher Bill Burke helps identify barriers that keep farmers in Kenya from participating in the dairy industry. Results published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics suggest that better technology, infrastructure, and access to markets may lead more people to take up dairy farming, which could improve rural food security and livelihoods.
 

Growing the dairy sector

Kenya’s dairy farms house 3.4 million cows, about 85 percent of all dairy cattle in East Africa. Yet within Kenya, the popularity of dairy products has risen steadily in recent years, and in 2006 the country became a net importer as demand outpaced supply.

Small family farms contribute the majority of Kenya’s dairy output, in addition to providing many rural jobs. The government of Kenya has targeted small-scale dairy operations as a key sector for boosting both domestic food supply and rural incomes.

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“A new government policy could aim to do three things,” said lead author Dr. Bill Burke, a research scholar at the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford. “First, to increase the number of farmers who produce dairy, second, increase the number of those producers that participate in the dairy market, and third, to increase each farmer’s productivity and sellable surplus. And to design a good policy, you need good data and good analysis.”

Previous studies fall short

Previous studies of the Kenyan dairy market rely on a “double hurdle” model, a type of statistical analysis that measures two things: why producers become net buyers versus net sellers of a certain product, and how much of that product they ultimately buy or sell.

But these models assume that all farmers produce the same product, which is not the case in the dairy sector, said Burke.

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Dairy farming is labor intensive and has high overhead costs. Farmers without access to cold storage facilities, or without a nearby place to sell their produce, risk losing their inventory to spoilage. Even more risk comes from the fact that the weather and the price of cattle feed can both change suddenly.

“Dairy farming isn’t like growing rice or corn. It is expensive, specialized and risky, so not all farmers do it,” said Burke. “If we really want to understand how to grow the Kenyan dairy sector, we need to understand why some farmers choose to produce dairy in the first place, and why others don’t.”

A new level of analysis 

To better understand why some farmers participate in the dairy market, Burke and his co-authors, Robert Myers and Thom Jayne from Michigan State University, used data from 1,275 farming households collected by staff at the Tegemeo Institute of Agricultural Policy and Development, who visited each home four times between 1997 and 2007.

The team then designed a model to analyze market participation among farmers. They developed a new “triple hurdle” model, adding a new level of analysis to the double hurdle model that allowed them to identify the factors that influence some farmers and not others to produce dairy.  

To produce or not produce?

The team’s triple hurdle model offered a clear advantage over previous studies. “The new model results are significantly different than if we had used a double hurdle approach, and the magnitude of our estimates are a statistically better fit to the data,” said Burke. “It provided us with a more nuanced understanding of how policy can influence dairy supply.”

Burke’s team found that farmers were more likely to be dairy producers the wealthier they were in terms of land, household assets and credit. Farmers were also more likely to join the dairy sector when they had access to improved technology such as specially-bred “grade” dairy cows and “zero grazing” systems for cattle feeding. Another important factor was the presence of commercial dairy processors and informal traders, because they provided farmers with more certainty that their produce would reach buyers.

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These same factors – wealth, technology, and marketing channels - helped determine the market position of a dairy producer: whether they were net sellers or net buyers of dairy. Infrastructure also played an important role. Producers were more likely to be net sellers when they had a formal education and nearby access to electricity and drivable roads.

“These data, and the new insights from our triple hurdle model, suggest that market channels are important incentives for farmers to participate in dairy production,” said Burke. “But we also see a clear case for increasing government investments in infrastructure like roads, rural electrification, and education. We hope our research will inform the government of Kenya as they design a new policy approach to increase dairy farmer participation and productivity.”

CONTACT

Dr. Bill Burke: burkewi2@stanford.edu, (650) 724-1290

Laura Seaman, Communications Manager: (650) 723-4920

In a lecture to the Stanford community Tuesday night, Professor Sir Gordon Conway argued that sustainably intensifying agriculture, especially in Africa, is the only way to feed a growing global population without greatly expanding the amount of land used for farming. Sir Gordon is an agricultural ecologist and was an early pioneer of sustainable agriculture while working in Malaysia in the 1960s. He is now a professor of international development at Imperial College London and the director of Agriculture for Impact, a project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Sir Gordon's lecture, "Can Sustainable Intensification Feed the World?" was the second installment of the Food and Nutrition Policy Symposium Series sponsored by the Center on Food Security and the Environment.

Sir Gordon described three major challenges to ensuring future global food security: food prices are higher and more volatile, one billion people are malnourished (including 1 in 5 children), and rising demand means that 60 to 100 percent more food will be needed to feed the world by 2050. Solving the food security crisis will mean improving both the quantity and the nutrition of food, at stable and affordable prices, in the face of major challenges.

These challenges include factors on the demand side of the global food economy, such as population growth, changing diets, and the use of crops for biofuels. Supply side factors like high fertilizer prices, climate change, and scarcity of land and water put even more pressure on the food system. 

The solution, Sir Gordon said, is agricultural intensification, a set of practices that allow farmers to produce more food with existing land and water. Sustainability is a key component, so that intensification does not also raise greenhouse gas emissions, deplete soil quality, or damage the resilience of farming systems. Sustainable intensification will be especially important in Africa, said Sir Gordon, where population growth and dietary changes will be most dramatic, and where currently crop yields are far below most other areas of the world.

 Farmers, scientists and policymakers can take several approaches to sustainable intensification. An ecological approach includes practices that safeguard environmental resources and reduce farmers’ dependence on chemicals like herbicides and pesticides, such as through organic farming, integrated pest management, agroforestry or conservation agriculture. A genetic intensification approach includes developing better plant varieties, with traits that promote more sustainable agriculture by resisting pests and diseases, or that provide more nutrition. A third approach is socio-economic intensification of agriculture, through the development of farmers’ cooperatives, better links between farmers and markets, and improved access by farmers to insurance and credit.

The goal, Sir Gordon said, is to help farmers “build resilient livelihoods” that will withstand economic and environmental shocks in the coming decades. Good science is important, but strong political leadership, especially within Africa, will be just as crucial.

Rosamond (Roz) Naylor has been named the first holder of the new William Wrigley Professorship in the School of Earth Sciences. Since 2006 Naylor has directed the Center on Food Security and the Environment, within the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. She is also associate professor, by courtesy, of Economics at Stanford.

"Professorships are the best way to recognize faculty for their superior leadership and commitment to research, teaching, service to the university and service to humanity," said Pamela Matson, dean of the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford. "Roz epitomizes these qualities - she is incredibly fitting as the inaugural holder of the William Wrigley Professorship."

Walter Falcon, professor (emeritus) of economics at Stanford and a longtime research collaborator of Naylor's, added: “All of Roz’s colleagues are delighted at her selection. She has long been a thought leader on food security issues, she has limitless energy, and she has an extraordinary capacity for bringing scholars together at Stanford and beyond.”

The new William Wrigley Professorship is supported by Mrs. Julie Ann Wrigley, AB '71 (Anthropology) and Ms. Alison Wrigley Rusack, AB '80 (Communication).

Naylor's research focuses on economic and biophysical dimensions of food security, and the environmental impacts of crop and animal production.  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. At Stanford, Naylor teaches courses on the World Food Economy, Human-Environment Interactions, and Sustainable Agriculture. 

Naylor currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Beijer Institute in Stockholm, is a Science Advisor for United Nation’s Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s initiative on Sustainable Development (Sustainable Agriculture section), and trustee of The Nature Conservancy California Chapter. Additionally, she serves on the editorial board of the journals Global Food Security and Journal on Food Security. Naylor 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. 

In a recent speech, Stanford professor Rosamond Naylor examined the wide range of challenges contributing to global food insecurity, which Naylor defined as a lack of plentiful, nutritious and affordable food. Naylor's lecture, titled "Feeding the World in the 21st Century," was part of the quarterly Earth Matters series sponsored by Stanford Continuing Studies and the Stanford School of Earth Sciences. Naylor, a professor of Environmental Earth System Science and director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford, is also a professor (by courtesy) of Economics, and the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

"One billion people go to bed day in and day out with chronic hunger," said Naylor. The problem of food insecurity, she explained, goes far beyond food supply. "We produce enough calories, just with cereal crops alone, to feed everyone on the planet," she said. Rather, food insecurity arises from a complex and interactive set of factors including poverty, malnutrition, disease, conflict, poor governance and volatile prices. Food supply depends on limited natural resources including water and energy, and food accessibility depends on government policies about land rights, biofuels, and food subsidies. Often, said Naylor, food policies in one country can impact food security in other parts of the world. Solutions to global hunger must account for this complexity, and for the "evolving" nature of food security.

As an example of this evolution, Naylor pointed to the success of China and India in reducing hunger rates from 70 percent to 15 percent within a single generation. Economic growth was key, as was the "Green Revolution," a series of advances in plant breeding, irrigation and agricultural technology that led to a doubling of global cereal crop production between 1970 and 2010. But Naylor warned that the success of the Green Revolution can lead to complacency about present-day food security challenges. China, for example, sharply reduced hunger as it underwent rapid economic growth, but now faces what Naylor described as a "second food security challenge" of micronutrient deficiency. Anemia, which is caused by a lack of dietary iron and which Naylor said is common in many rural areas of China, can permanently damage children's cognitive development and school performance, and eventually impede a country’s economic growth.

Hunger knows no boundaries

Although hunger is more prevalent in the developing world, food insecurity knows no geographic boundaries, said Naylor. Every country, including wealthy economies like the United States, struggles with problems of food availability, access, and nutrition. "Rather than think of this as 'their problem' that we don't need to deal with, really it's our problem too," Naylor said.

She pointed out that one in five children in the United States is chronically hungry, and 50 million Americans receive government food assistance. Many more millions go to soup kitchens every night, she added. "We are in a precarious position with our own food security, with big implications for public health and educational attainment," Naylor said. A major paradox of the United States' food security challenge is that hunger increasingly coexists with obesity. For the poorest Americans, cheap food offers abundant calories but low nutritional value. To improve the health and food security of millions of Americans, "linking policy in a way that can enhance the incomes of the poorest is really important, and it's the hard part,” she said.” It's not easy to fix the inequality issue."

Success stories

When asked whether there were any "easy" decisions that the global community can agree to, Naylor responded, "What we need to do for a lot of these issues is pretty clear, but how we get after it is not always agreed upon." She added, "But I think we've seen quite a few success stories," including the growing research on climate resilient crops, new scientific tools such as plant genetics, improved modeling techniques for water and irrigation systems, and better knowledge about how to use fertilizer more efficiently. She also said that the growing body of agriculture-focused climate research was encouraging, and that Stanford is a leader on this front.

Naylor is the editor and co-author of The Evolving Sphere of Food Security, a new book from Oxford University Press. The book features a team of 19 faculty authors from 5 Stanford schools including Earth science, economics, law, engineering, medicine, political science, international relations, and biology. The all-Stanford lineup was intentional, Naylor said, because the university is committed to interdisciplinary research that addresses complex global issues like food security, and because "agriculture is incredibly dominated by policy, and Stanford has a long history of dealing with some of these policy elements. This is the glue that enables us to answer really challenging questions."