This project focuses on private and public sector strategies for promoting sustainable palm oil, with sustainability defined by environmental, social, and economic objectives. The main goals are:
In a new study in the journal BioScience, a team of researchers including Stanford professor Roz Naylor links marijuana cultivation to widespread environmental damage in California and calls for greater regulation of the crop’s impact on natural ecosystems.
Recent debates about marijuana legalization have focused on the potential social, health and economic impacts, with little attention paid to environmental issues. The new study, spearheaded by the California chapter of The Nature Conservancy, brings environmental concerns to the forefront of the policy discussion. Between 60 and 70 percent of the marijuana consumed in the United States comes from California.
Marijuana plants require nearly twice as much water as do grapes or tomatoes, and the last five years have brought a 50 to 100 percent increase in the amount of northern California watershed lands used for marijuana production – figures that are causing growing concern among conservationists in the midst of a severe statewide drought.
The majority of California agriculture is subject to heavy water use regulations. Farmers of most irrigated crops help their plants through the dry summer months by filling water tanks in the winter, when streams and springs are full.
By contrast, many marijuana growers draw surface water during the plant’s summer growing season, when drought conditions are worst.
“Taking water directly from rivers and streams in the summer not only reduces the water available for agriculture but also threatens wildlife species, especially birds and fish, that depend on these wetland ecosystems for survival,” said Naylor.
Illegal marijuana plantations in California are associated with a wide range of other environmental impacts, including pollution, poaching, and pesticides that poison wildlife. Even legal outdoor cultivation can cause deforestation and soil erosion.
The research team identified several opportunities to reduce the environmental impacts of marijuana cultivation in California. For example, states can:
“Regardless of the legal status of marijuana, the way we are currently managing its impacts on water and wildlife in California just doesn’t work,” said Naylor. “Bringing these impacts into future policy discussions about marijuana is critical for protecting California’s environmental resources given the high value and demand for the crop.”
Naylor is William Wrigley Professor of Earth Science at Stanford, director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. She serves as a trustee of The Nature Conservancy California Chapter.
Laura Seaman, Communications Manager, Center on Food Security and the Environment: lseaman@stanford.edu
Lisa Park, Media Relations, The Nature Conservancy: lpark@tnc.org.
The liberalization of marijuana policies, including the legalization of medical and recreational marijuana, is sweeping the United States and other countries. Marijuana cultivation can have significant negative collateral effects on the environment that are often unknown or overlooked. Focusing on the state of California, where by some estimates 60%–70% of the marijuana consumed in the United States is grown, we argue that (a) the environmental harm caused by marijuana cultivation merits a direct policy response, (b) current approaches to governing the environmental effects are inadequate, and (c) neglecting discussion of the environmental impacts of cultivation when shaping future marijuana use and possession policies represents a missed opportunity to reduce, regulate, and mitigate environmental harm.
The University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Development Policy and Practice (GSDPP), in collaboration with the Leadership Academy for Development (LAD), an affiliate of Stanford University, will be offering a course in April 2015 that addresses some of the challenges faced by public sector leaders as they foster economic growth in politically-charged environments.
This course was run successfully in both 2011 and 2013. The 2015 version – updated with new case studies – will also be facilitated by international and national trainers and experts.
The course is a 5-day, intensive programme for a small number of high level government officials and business leaders from South Africa and other African countries (25-30 in total). It will explore how government can encourage and enable the private sector to play a more effective, productive role in economic growth and development. The curriculum is designed to reinforce and illustrate three critically important hypotheses about the role of public policy in private sector development.
Case studies for this course are available here.
University of Cape Town and the Cape Milner Hotel
Johannesburg, South Africa
Governments must do more to diversify the types of crops grown throughout the world. If they don’t, climate change may jeopardize the global food supply, a leading agriculture researcher told a Stanford audience.
Cary Fowler, a senior advisor and former executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, was a driving force behind the creation of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. Commonly known as the “doomsday vault,” the repository of ancient and modern seeds from around the world ensures that future generations will have access to a wide enough range of crop traits to adapt global agriculture to a changing climate.
Dr. Cary Fowler in Svalbard, Norway, the home of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
During a May 6 talk sponsored by FSE as part of the center’s Food and Nutrition Policy Symposium, Fowler warned that increasingly high temperatures and water shortages interfere with the natural growing cycles of many crops and can even reduce the nutritional quality of some plants. Higher temperatures also give way to new pests, diseases, and soil microorganisms that threaten yields.
“The biggest impacts from climate change will be in sub-Saharan Africa,” Fowler said, a region where many people already suffer serious poverty and hunger, and where crop yields lag behind the rest of the world. Fowler said that as climate pressure on agriculture intensifies, the world can expect to see an uptick in civil conflict, restrictive trade policies, and suffering among the world’s poorest people.
“Crops are going to be facing new combinations of conditions for which there is no historical experience,” said Fowler. “They will require new combinations of traits” that can only be developed by preserving genetic diversity and proactively breeding new varieties.
“There are 1.3 billion people living on subsistence farms today,” said Dr. Cary Fowler to a Stanford audience on May 6. “How will they adapt to climate change without access to diversity?”
Fowler called for the U.S. and foreign governments to embrace their “inherited evolutionary responsibility” for preserving the huge diversity of crops grown by farmers throughout human history.
The United States is the ideal candidate to lead the world in using crop genetic diversity to adapt agriculture to climate challenges, he said. “The U.S. is well-positioned to research diversity, model future climate and assemble seed packages,” enlisting farmers in the U.S. and abroad in “another mass adaptation experiment” like the one American agriculture undertook in the 18th and 19th centuries.
“I know that sounds like a wild and crazy idea,” Fowler said. “But I haven’t heard any alternatives to it. If we’re assuming we’re going to have development without diversity, that would really be a historically unprecedented experiment.”
“If agriculture doesn’t adapt,” he added, “neither will we.”
A diverse history
In the late 1700s the United States food system lacked diversity and infrastructure. “Very few of the crops we grow now in the U.S. are native,” said Fowler. Early on, “it wasn’t always evident what crops from abroad would grow well in the U.S.”
The government soon set out to expand and diversify American agriculture. U.S. Navy ships collected seeds on overseas voyages, and U.S. diplomats brought back new crops from postings abroad. Government-sponsored expeditions sought out foreign plants with specific disease-resistant traits. The U.S. signed two dozen seed-exchange agreements with other countries, and lowered taxes on imported seeds to boost global crop exchange.
“The United States amassed a much more diverse array of seeds and crops as a result,” said Fowler. One program introduced 600 new apple varieties, 700 new types of pears, and 353 new varieties of mangoes to American farmers.
But the United States did not simply collect new crops. It also invested in research to develop new varieties, including through plant breeding.
Genetic erosion
Research into plant breeding quickly yielded many of the modern varieties of crops we grow today in the United States.
“With plant breeding came the rise of modern varieties that had useful traits like disease resistance,” said Fowler. A small handful of new varieties quickly gained popularity with American farmers, who now had a choice about whether or not to save seeds and grow many varieties of a crop at once. Most farmers chose not to, instead relying on the same few mainstream varieties their neighbors were growing.
This shift has led to what Fowler described as the “genetic erosion” of agriculture, a trend that can only be reversed by reviving the tradition of seed saving and plant breeding on a global scale.
Seed banks
“I have probably been to more seed banks than any other person,” said Fowler. Seeds from most crops can survive hundreds or even thousands of years in storage, but most storage facilities lack the physical security to provide lasting safe haven. Many seed banks are poorly built, too warm or humid for long-term storage, and vulnerable to natural disasters. Other facilities suffer damaged during civil wars and uprisings.
Even if banks are physically secure, said Fowler, most simply do not operate on a large enough scale to protect global crop diversity. “Most crops in the world have between one and 10 total seed samples in storage, and most have no plant breeders working on them at all,” said Fowler.
The doomsday vault
In 2005 Fowler was chosen to lead an international coalition to build the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The Norwegian government owns the facility, and it is also managed by the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center.
The vault is built into the side of a mountain in the far north of Norway, said Fowler, because the ideal temperature for storing seeds is minus 18 degrees Celsius.
Inside the frozen walls of the vault are shelves full of boxes holding duplicate seeds from smaller seed banks around the world. Foreign governments that contribute samples pay nothing for storage, and the seed packages are never opened by vault staff, said Fowler.
“The vault now houses seeds from over 864,000 varieties of plants,” said Fowler, adding that not a single sample has ever been lost.
Seed storage boxes at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
The facility’s nickname, “the doomsday vault,” comes not only from its rugged physical location but from its capacity to withstand disasters – something its planners took great care to design. “We calculated how high the water would go if all ice in the world melted and we had the world’s largest ever tsunami,” said Fowler. “The vault is five stories above that.”
“Not a solution”
Fowler emphasized that no doomsday vault, no matter how secure its walls or how ample its seed collection, can solve the problem of crop genetic erosion. Building a vault “doesn’t mean that we as a society are getting serious about adapting agriculture to climate change,” Fowler said. Plant breeding and crop research programs focused on developing new climate-resilient varieties are just as crucial as saving seeds.
Although a few major staple crops like rice, wheat and corn are continually bred and improved in research labs around the world, most crops are largely ignored by researchers. For example, there are only six breeders of yams worldwide.
“Why conserve it if you’re not going to use it?” Fowler asked. “We are acting like crops are going to adapt by themselves, and we are assuming all but a handful of crops are unimportant.”
Quoting Charles Darwin, Fowler added that “it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
Full video and audio recordings of Dr. Fowler's May 6 lecture, and his interview with FSE director Roz Naylor, are available here.
FSE director Roz Naylor has been selected to deliver the 6th annual Ned Ames Honorary Lecture at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY on Friday, April 24. Her lecture on "Feeding the World in the 21st Century," is free and open to the public, and a video recording of the event will be available on the Cary Institute's website shortly after the talk.
Indonesia produces more palm oil and consumes more palm oil per capita than any country in the world. This article examines the processes through which Indonesia has promoted palm-oil consumption and some of the consequences of that promotion. Partial equilibrium modelling shows that Indonesia's remarkable increase in palm-oil consumption since 1985 is not largely attributable to population and income growth. Instead, much of this consumption growth has resulted from substitution away from coconut oil, facilitated by government policies on technology, pricing, distribution, and trade. The switch from coconut oil to palm oil in Indonesia was associated with increased land conversions to agriculture and diminished smallholder competitiveness. Despite lower rates of cooking-oil substitution in the future, simulations suggest that Indonesia's total palm-oil consumption in 2035 will be at least double that of 2010.
The lost decades for China in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s look remarkably like the lost decades of Africa in the 1980s an 1990s. Poor land rights, weak incentives, incomplete markets and inappropriate investment portfolios. However, China burst out of its stagnation in the 1980s and has enjoyed three decades of remarkable growth. In this paper we examine the record of the development of China's food economy and identify the policies that helped generate the growth and transformation of agriculture. Incentives, markets and strategic investments by the state were key. Equally important, however, is what the state did not do. Policies that worked and those that failed (or those that were ignored) are addressed. Most importantly, we try to take an objective, nuanced look at the lessons that might be learned and those that are not relevant for Africa. Many parts of Africa have experienced positive growth during the past decade. We examine if there are any lessons that might be helpful in turning ten positive years into several more decades of transformation.