This past autumn, the Freeman Spogli Institute ( FSI ) in conjunction with the Woods Institute for the Environment launched a program on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) to address the deficit in academia and, on a larger scale, the global dialogue surrounding the critical issues of food security, poverty, and environmental degradation.

“Hunger is the silent killer and moral outrage of our time; however, there are few university programs in the United States designed to study and solve the problem of global food insecurity,” states program director Rosamond L. Naylor. “FSE’s dual affiliation with FSI and Stanford’s new Woods Institute for the Environment position it well to make significant steps in this area.”

Through a focused research portfolio and an interdisciplinary team of scholars led by Naylor and Center for Environmental Science and Policy (CESP) co-director Walter P. Falcon, FSE aims to design new approaches to solve these persistent problems, expand higher education on food security and the environment at Stanford, and provide direct policy outreach.

Productive food systems and their environmental consequences form the core of the program. Fundamentally, the FSE program seeks to understand the food security issues that are of paramount interest to poor countries, the food diversification challenges that are a focus of middle-income nations, and the food safety and subsidy concerns prominent in richer nations.

CHRONIC HUNGER IN A TIME OF PROSPERITY

Although the world’s supply of basic foods has doubled over the past century, roughly 850 million people (12 percent of the world’s population) suffer from chronic hunger. Food insecurity deaths during the past 20 years outnumber war deaths by a factor of at least 5 to 1. Food insecurity is particularly widespread in agricultural regions where resource scarcity and environmental degradation constrain productivity and income growth.

FSE is currently assessing the impacts of climate variability on food security in Asian rice economies. This ongoing project combines the expertise of atmospheric scientists, agricultural economists, and policy analysts to understand and mitigate the adverse effects of El Niño-related climate variability on rice production and food security. As a consequence of Falcon and Naylor’s long-standing roles as policy advisors in Indonesia, models developed through this project have already been embedded into analytical units within Indonesia’s Ministries of Agriculture, Planning, and Finance. “With such forecasts in hand, the relevant government agencies are much better equipped to mitigate the negative consequences of El Niño events on incomes and food security in the Indonesian countryside,” explain Falcon and Naylor.

FOOD DIVERSIFICATION AND INTENSIFICATION

With rapid income growth, urbanization, and population growth in developing economies, priorities shift from food security to the diversification of agricultural production and consumption. “Meat production is projected to double by 2020,” states Harold Mooney, CESP senior fellow and an author of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. As a result, land once used to provide grains for humans now provides feed for hogs and poultry.

These trends will have major consequences for the global environment—affecting the quality of the atmosphere, water, and soil due to nutrient overloads; impacting marine fisheries both locally and globally through fish meal use; and threatening human health, as, for example, through excessive use of antibiotics.

An FSE project is analyzing the impact of intensive livestock production and assessing the environmental effects to gain a better understanding of the true costs of this resource-intensive system. A product of this work recently appeared as a Policy Forum piece in the December 9, 2005, issue of Science titled "Losing the Links Between Livestock and Land."

Factors contributing to the global growth of livestock systems, lead author Naylor notes, are declining feed-grain prices, relatively inexpensive transportation costs, and trade liberalization. “But many of the true costs remain largely unaccounted for,” she says, including destruction of forests and grasslands to provide farmland for feed crops destined not for humans but for livestock; utilization of large quantities of freshwater; and nitrogen losses from croplands and animal manure.

Naylor and her research team are seeking better ways to track all costs of livestock production, especially hidden costs of ecosystem degradation and destruction. “What is needed is a re-coupling of crop and livestock systems,” Naylor says, “if not physically, then through pricing and other policy mechanisms that reflect social costs of resource use and ecological abuse.” Such policies “should not significantly compromise the improving diets of developing countries, nor should they prohibit trade,” Naylor adds. Instead, they should “focus on regulatory and incentive-based tools to encourage livestock and feed producers to internalize pollution costs, minimize nutrient run-off, and pay the true price of water.”

LOOKING AHEAD

The future of the program on Food Security and the Environment looks bright and expansive. Building on existing research at Stanford, researchers are identifying avenues in the world’s least developed countries to enhance orphan crop production— crops with little international trade and investment, but high local value for food and nutrition security. This work seeks to identify advanced genetic and genomic strategies, and natural resource management initiatives, to improve orphan crop yields, enhance crop diversity, and increase rural incomes through orphan crop production.

Another priority research area is development of biofuels. As countries seek energy self-reliance and look for alternatives to food and feed subsidies under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, the conversion of corn, sugar, and soybeans to ethanol and other energy sources becomes more attractive. New extraction methods are making the technology more efficient, and high crude oil prices are fundamentally changing the economics of biomass energy conversion. A large switch by key export food and feed suppliers, such as the United States and Brazil, to biofuels could fundamentally alter export prices, and hence the world food and feed situation. A team of FSE researchers will assess the true costs of these conversions.

The FSE program recently received a grant through the Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies to initiate new research activities. One project links ongoing research at Stanford on the environmental and resource costs of industrial livestock production and trade to assess the extent of Brazil’s rainforest destruction for soybean production. “Tens of millions of hectares of native grassland and rainforest are currently being cleared for soybean production to supply the global industrial livestock sector,” says Naylor. An interdisciplinary team will examine strategies to achieve an appropriate balance between agricultural commodity trade, production practices, and conservation in Brazil’s rainforest states.

“I’m extremely pleased to see the rapid growth of FSE and am encouraged by the recent support provided through the new Presidential Fund,” states Naylor. “It enables the program to engage faculty members from economics, political science, biology, civil and environmental engineering, earth sciences, and medicine—as well as graduate students throughout the university—in a set of collaborative research activities that could significantly improve human well-being and the quality of the environment.”

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Agricultural Development Program has awarded Stanford University’s Program on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) and a team of collaborators $3.8 million over three years to conduct a quantitative assessment of the effect of biofuels expansion on food security in the developing world. This work will determine how different scenarios of expanded biofuels production in rich and poor countries will affect global and regional food prices, farmer incomes, and food consumption of the poor. In three case-study countries (India, Mozambique, Senegal), it will make a more detailed assessment of the opportunities and pitfalls associated with an array of possible biofuels development scenarios (e.g., using different crops for biofuels production, using marginal land versus highly productive land, etc.). We expect the work will represent the first systematic, detailed effort to address the effects of biofuels expansion on welfare in poor countries and the first available analytic tool for assessing possible biofuels investments in individual developing countries. Project collaborators include FSE, the International Food Policy Research Institute, the Center on Chinese Agricultural Policy, and the University of Nebraska.

Through this grant, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation aims to assess how biofuels may affect smallholder farmers in the developing world. This includes assessing both the risks, such as increasing food prices, and the potential opportunities for smallholder farmers to leverage biofuels to boost their productivity, increase their incomes, and build better lives for themselves and their families. The foundation and Stanford University will disseminate the findings widely to inform a broad audience, including policymakers.

FSE is also very pleased to announce a private gift from Lawrence Kemp for further work in the biofuels area. The Kemp gift will be devoted to building a team of faculty and students on campus who will analyze the transmission of global price effects to local markets, provide policy advice and communication on biofuels, and expand the field-level coverage of Stanford’s biofuels work.

In the November 2007 issue of Environment, project collaborators Rosamond L. Naylor (FSE), Adam Liska, Marshall Burke (FSE), Walter P. Falcon (FSE), Joanne Gaskell, Scott Rozelle (FSE), and Kenneth Cassman demonstrate how high energy prices and biofuelspromoting agricultural policy result in higher food prices generally and then examine in detail the potential global effects of biofuels expansion in four countries for four crops—corn in the United States, cassava in China, sugarcane and soy in Brazil, and palm oil in Indonesia. They argue that in each case, the threats to global food security from biofuels expansion likely outweigh the benefits, especially in the short run. This is because in many poor countries these crops play an important role in the diets of the poor and because the poorest in the world typically spend more money on food than they earn in income through farming. They also note that “second generation” technologies such as cellulosic biofuels will likely not play a significant role in biofuels production over the next decade or longer—and thus in the near-term are very unlikely to be the win-win that their proponents suggest. “The ripple effect: biofuels, food security, and the environment” excerpted from Environment, November 2007

The integration of the agricultural and energy sectors caused by rapid growth in the biofuels market signals a new era in food policy and sustainable development. For the first time in decades, agricultural commodity markets could experience a sustained increase in prices, breaking the long-term price decline that has benefited food consumers worldwide. Whether this transition occurs—and how it will affect global hunger and poverty—remain to be seen. Will food markets begin to track the volatile energy market in terms of price and availability? Will changes in agricultural commodity markets benefit net food producers and raise farm income in poor countries? How will biofuels-induced changes in agricultural commodity markets affect net consumers of food? At risk are more than 800 million food-insecure people—mostly in rural areas and dependent to some extent on agriculture for incomes— who live on less than $1 per day and spend the majority of their incomes on food. An additional 2–2.5 billion people living on $1 to $2 per day are also at risk, as rising commodity prices could pull them swiftly into a food-insecure state.

The potential impact of a large global expansion of biofuels production capacity on net food producers and consumers in low-income countries presents challenges for food policy planners and raises the question of whether sustainable development targets at a more general level can be reached. Achieving the 2015 Millennium Development Goals adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2000, which include halving the world’s undernourished and impoverished, lies at the core of global initiatives to improve human well-being and equity, yet today virtually no progress has been made toward achieving the dual goals of alleviating global hunger and poverty. The record varies on a regional basis: Gains have been made in many Asia-Pacific and Latin American-Caribbean countries, but progress has been mixed in South Asia and setbacks have occurred in numerous sub-Saharan African countries. Whether the biofuels boom will move extremely poor countries closer to or further from the Millennium Development Goals remains uncertain.

Biofuels growth also will influence efforts to meet two sets of longer-run development targets. The first encompasses the goals of a “sustainability transition,” articulated by the Board on Sustainable Development of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which seeks to provide energy, materials, and information to meet the needs of a global population of 8–10 billion by 2050, while reducing hunger and poverty and preserving the planet’s environmental life-support systems. The second is the Great Transition of the Global Scenario Group, convened by the Stockholm Environment Institute, which focuses specifically on reductions in hunger and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions beyond 2050. As additional demands are placed on the agricultural resource base for fuel production, will ecosystem services (such as hydrologic balances, biodiversity, and soil quality) that support agricultural activities be eroded? Will biofuels development require a large expansion of crop area, which would involve conversion of marginal land, rainforest, and wetlands to arable land? And what will be the net effect of biofuels expansion on global climate change?

Although the questions outnumber the answers at this stage, two trends seem clear: Total energy use will continue to escalate as incomes rise in both industrial and developing countries, and biofuels will remain a critical energy development target in many parts of the world if petroleum prices exceed $55–$60 per barrel. Even if petroleum prices dip, policy support for biofuels as a means of boosting rural incomes in several key countries will likely generate continued expansion of biofuels production capacity. These trends will have widespread ripple effects on food security—defined here as the ability of all people at all times to have access to affordable food and nutrition for a healthy lifestyle—and on the environment at local, regional, and global scales. The ripple effects will be either positive or negative depending on the country in question and the policies in play.

The Center for Environmental Science and Policy (CESP), one of FSI's longstanding research centers dedicated to interdisciplinary research on the environment, transitioned to its new home in the Woods Institute for the Environment on September 1, 2007. An outgrowth of the university's Environmental Forum, CESP was formally established in 1998 under the leadership of Walter P. Falcon, the Farnsworth Professor of International Agricultural Policy, Emeritus, and Donald Kennedy, Bing Professor of Environmental Science, Emeritus, and former president of Stanford, followed by co-directors Pamela Matson, now the dean of the School of Earth Sciences, and Stephen Schneider, Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Studies.

The center's principal mission was to provide a venue at Stanford for interdisciplinary research on the environment. Groundbreaking projects and programs launched over the past decade by CESP include: the Integrated Studies of Sustainability: Land-Water systems of the Yaqui Basin, which brought together specialists to explore management and policy alternatives that could increase human welfare and minimize resource and environmental risks in the Yaqui Basin in Sonora, Mexico; the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD), an interdisciplinary program that draws on the fields of political science, law and economics to investigate how the production and consumption of energy affect human welfare and environmental quality; and the Program on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), which examines potential solutions to the persistent problems of global hunger and environmental damage from agricultural practices worldwide. PESD was spun off as a freestanding program under the direction of David G. Victor, while FSE continues as a joint program of Woods and FSI under the direction of Rosamond L. Naylor. FSI would like to recognize CESP for the extraordinary contributions over the past decade to environmental research and policy, and to wish its faculty, researchers, and staff success in their new interdisciplinary home within Woods.

This past autumn the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) in conjunction with the Woods Institute for the Environment launched a program on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) to address the deficit in academia and, on a larger scale, the global dialogue surrounding the critical issues of food security, poverty, and environmental degradation.

"Hunger is the silent killer and moral outrage of our time; however, there are few university programs in the United States designed to study and solve the problem of global food insecurity," states program director Rosamond L. Naylor. "FSE's dual affiliation with FSI and the new Stanford Institute for the Environment position it well to make significant steps in this area."

Through a focused research portfolio and an interdisciplinary team of scholars led by Naylor and CESP (Center for Environmental Science and Policy) co-director Walter P. Falcon, FSE aims to design new approaches to solve these persistent and under-prioritized problems, expand higher education on food security and the environment at Stanford, and provide direct policy outreach.

Productive food systems and their environmental consequences are at the core of the program. While many of these systems are global in character, but they are influenced significantly by differing food objectives, income level, and instruments among nations. The program thus seeks to understand the food security issues that are of paramount interest to poor countries, the food diversification challenges that are a focus of middle-income nations, and the food safety and subsidy concerns prominent in richer nations.

Chronic hunger in a time of prosperity

Although the world's supply of basic foods has doubled over the past century, roughly 850 million people (12 percent of the world's population) suffer from chronic hunger. Food insecurity deaths during the past 20 years outnumber war deaths by a factor of at least 5 to 1. Food insecurity is particularly widespread in agricultural regions where resource scarcity and environmental degradation constrain productivity and income growth.

FSE is currently assessing the impacts of climate variability on food security in Asian rice economies. This ongoing project combines the expertise of atmospheric scientists, agricultural economists, and policy analysts to understand and mitigate the adverse effects of El Niño-related climate variability on rice production and food security under current and future global warming conditions. As a consequence of Falcon and Naylor's long-standing roles as policy advisors in Indonesia, models developed through this project have already been embedded into analytical units within Indonesia's Ministry of Agriculture, the Planning Ministry, and the Ministry of Finance.

"With such forecasts in hand, the relevant government agencies are much better equipped to mitigate the negative consequences of El Niño events on incomes and food security in the Indonesian countryside," explain Falcon and Naylor.

Food diversification and intensification

With rapid income growth, urbanization, and population growth in developing economies, priorities shift from food security to the diversification of agricultural production and consumption. "Meat production is projected to double by 2020" states Harold A. Mooney, CESP senior fellow and an author of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. "In China alone, meat consumption has more than doubled in the past generation." As a result, land once used to provide grains for humans now provides feed for hogs and poultry.

These trends will have major consequences on the global environment-affecting the quality of the atmosphere, water, and soil due to nutrient overloads; impacting marine fisheries both locally and globally through fish meal use; and threatening human health, as, for example, through excessive use of antibiotics.

An FSE project is looking at these trends as it relates to intensive livestock production and assessing the environmental impacts to gain a better understanding of the true costs of this resource-intensive system. A product of this work recently appeared as a Policy Forum piece in the December 9, 2005, issue of Science titled "Losing the Links Between Livestock and Land".

Numerous factors have contributed to the global growth of livestock systems, lead author Naylor notes, including declining feed-grain prices, relatively inexpensive transportation costs, and trade liberalization. "But many of the true costs remain largely unaccounted for," she says. Those costs include destruction of forests and grasslands to provide farmland for corn, soybeans, and other feed crops destined not directly for humans but for livestock; utilization of large quantities of freshwater; and nitrogen losses from croplands and animal manure.

Naylor and her research team are seeking better ways to track all costs of livestock production, especially the hidden ones related to ecosystem degradation and destruction. "What is needed is a re-coupling of crop and livestock systems," Naylor says. "If not physically, then through pricing and other policy mechanisms that reflect social costs of resource use and ecological abuse."

Such policies "should not significantly compromise the improving diets of developing countries, nor should they prohibit trade," Naylor adds. Instead, they should "focus on regulatory and incentive-based tools to encourage livestock and feed producers to internalize pollution costs, minimize nutrient run-off, and pay the true price of water."

Looking ahead

The future of the program on Food Security and the Environment looks bright, busy, and expansive. While a varied portfolio of projects is in line for the upcoming year, a strong emphasis remains in the area of food security. Building on existing research at Stanford, researchers are identifying avenues for enhancing orphan crop production in the world's least developed countries-crops with little international trade and investment, but with high local value in terms of food and nutrition security. The work seeks to identify advanced genetic and genomic strategies, along with natural resource management strategies, to improve orphan crop yields and stability, enhance crop diversity, and increase rural incomes through orphan crop production.

Another priority area of research centers on the development of biofuels. Biofuels are becoming increasingly a part of the policy set for world food and agriculture. As countries such as the United States seek energy self-reliance and look for alternatives to food and feed subsidies under WTO (World Trade Organization) rules, the conversion of corn, sugar, and soybeans to ethanol and other energy sources becomes more attractive. New extraction methods are making the technology more efficient, and crude oil prices at $60 per barrel are fundamentally changing the economics of biomass energy conversion. A large switch by key export food and feed suppliers, such as the United States and Brazil, to biofuels could fundamentally alter export prices, and hence the world food and feed situation. A team of FSE researchers will assess the true costs of these conversions.

The FSE program recently received a grant through the Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies to initiate new interdisciplinary research activities. One such project links ongoing research at Stanford on the environmental and resource costs of industrial livestock production and trade to assess the extent and rate of Brazil's rainforest destruction for soybean production. "Tens of millions of hectares of native grassland and rainforest are currently being cleared for soybean production to supply the global industrial livestock sector," says Naylor. A significant share of Brazil's soybeans is being shipped to China, where rapid income growth is fueling tremendous increases in meat consumption."

A team of remote-sensing experts, ecologists, agronomists, and economists will be looking at the ecological effects on the landscape through biogeochemical changes and biodiversity loss, the impacts of land clearing on the regional hydrologic cycle and climate change, the economic patterns of trade, and the role of policies to achieve an appropriate balance between agricultural commodity trade, production practices, and conservation in Brazil's rainforest states.

"I'm extremely pleased to see the rapid growth of FSE and am encouraged by the recent support provided through the Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies," states Naylor. "It enables the program to engage faculty members from economics, political science, biology, civil and environmental engineering, earth sciences, and medicine-as well as graduate students throughout the university-in a set of collaborative research activities that could significantly improve human well-being and the quality of the environment."