Stanford students belong to the first generation that could witness the end of extreme global poverty — in what would be one of humankind's greatest achievements — the head of the World Bank said during a recent talk on campus.

But their generation, he said, is also likely to experience the first global pandemic since the 1918 influenza that killed more than 50 million people.

Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, said innovations in health, education and finance are behind the World Bank's twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity for the bottom 40 percent of the global population.

Speaking at the inaugural conference of the Stanford Global Development and Poverty Initiative on Oct. 29, Kim lauded faculty and students for their multidisciplinary approach in tackling poverty and improving public health. He is an infectious disease physician who oversaw World Health Organization initiatives on HIV/AIDS.

"Seeking transformative solutions to challenges of development and poverty that are necessarily cross-disciplinary is exactly what a great university should be doing," Kim said in his speech at Stanford.

The World Bank announced last month that the number of people living on less than $1.90 a day is expected to drop to 9.6 percent of the global population by the end of the year. That is down from 36 percent in 1990.

The bank has pledged to cut that rate to 3 percent by 2030.

"We expect the extreme poverty rate to drop below 10 percent for the first time in human history," he said. "This is the best news in the world today. And this is the first generation in human history that has been able to see that potential outcome." 

Promoting prosperity

One of the co-founders of Partners in Health, Kim was the keynote speaker at the daylong conference, "Shared Prosperity and Health," which drew together Stanford faculty and researchers, plus government and NGO officials from around the world.

Stanford's global development and poverty effort is a university-wide initiative of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies, known as Stanford Seed, and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. The conference was held at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, which was a partner in the event.

Kim's talk was optimistic about the newly adopted U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, with an ambitious agenda to end poverty and hunger, ensure healthy lives, empower women and girls and attain quality education for all children by 2030.

While those goals seem lofty, Kim pointed to the accomplishment of bringing down extreme poverty to 10 percent, a figure many had once said was impossible.

Ninety-one percent of children in developing countries now attend primary school, up from 83 percent in 2000, he said. And the number of people on antiretroviral drugs for treatment of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa has increased eightfold in the last decade.

"But we're humbled by the challenges ahead," Kim said. "Rising global temperatures will have devastating impacts on poor countries and poor people – and, as we saw with Ebola, major pandemics are likely to disproportionately affect the poor."

Pandemic threats

Kim said that most virologists and infectious disease experts are certain a pandemic will sweep the world in the next 30 years. He said that would lead to more than 30 million deaths and anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of lost GDP.

He blasted the global community for taking eight months to respond to the Ebola crisis in West Africa, noting that Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia had among the fastest growing economies in Africa before the outbreak killed more than 11,000 people – most of whom were poor.

In an effort to speed up financial aid the next time such an outbreak occurs, the World Bank is developing the Pandemic Emergency Facility, which would disburse funding immediately to national governments and responding agencies.

Rajiv Shah, the administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development from 2010-2015, spoke earlier at the conference about his work leading the U.S. efforts to contain Ebola.

"Three small countries with total population of maybe 30 million people had such weak health systems with so little domestic investment – in one country $6 per capita health investment per year – that when Ebola became a crisis there was no first-line of defense," he said.

By October 2014, the U.S. was pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into containment efforts, including the establishment of a 2,500-personnel military deployment to hit Ebola on the ground. Shah said President Obama "stayed extraordinarily true to the science" of containment at the source.

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Stunted children 

Moving beyond containment of epidemics, Kim said the most important investment developing countries could make in their people starts when a woman becomes pregnant. Using a combination of health, nutrition and education will have lifelong benefits for each child, as well as for the country in which each prospers.

The World Bank estimates that 26 percent of all children under age 5 in developing countries are stunted, which means they are malnourished and under-stimulated, risking a loss of cognitive abilities that lasts a lifetime. The number climbs to 36 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, giving those children limited prospects in life."This is a disgrace, a global scandal and, in my view, akin to a medical emergency," Kim said. "Children who are stunted by age 5 will not have an equal opportunity in life. If your brain won't let you learn and adapt in a fast-changing world, you won't prosper and, neither will society. All of us lose."

From 2001 to 2013, the World Bank invested $3.3 billion in early childhood development programs in poor countries. Kim said innovative policymaking and financial tools allowed the bank to help Peru cut its rate of child stunting in half to 14 percent in just eight years.

"Progress is possible – and it can happen quickly. But we must do even more,"he said.

Kim said the world set a target in 2012 to reduce stunting in children by 40 percent. But that would still leave 100 million children malnourished and undereducated. The bank and world leaders should pledge to end stunting for all children by 2030, he said.

"With partners like the Global Development and Poverty Initiative and the entire Stanford community, I'm full of hope that we can indeed be the first generation in human history to end extreme poverty and create a more just and prosperous world for everyone on the planet."

Read more here about another innovation to improve health in the developing world.

Read the original post on Medium.com:

A Global Perspective on Food Policy

I applaud Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, Ricardo Salvador, and Olivier de Schutter for advocating the introduction of a national food policy in the U.S. Greater emphasis in our current farm legislation on nutrition, health, equity, and the environment is clearly warranted and long overdue. As the authors note, Americans’ access to adequate nutrition at all income levels affects educational and health outcomes for the nation as a whole. Poor nutrition thus plays a role in determining the level and distribution of economic and social wellbeing in the U.S, now and in the future. It is surprising that no one within the large circle of Presidential hopefuls has raised the topic of food, not just agriculture, as a major political issue for the 2016 election.

The U.S. is not unique. Virtually every country with an agrarian base has, at some point in history, introduced agricultural policies that support farmers and provide incentives for them to produce major commodities. At the time, governments have been able to justify these policies on several grounds: national security (avoiding excess dependence on foreign nations for food), economic growth (using agricultural surpluses as an engine of economic growth), and social stability (keeping its population well-fed to avoid social unrest). Once agricultural policies are implemented, they typically give rise to institutions and vested political interests that perpetuate a supply-side orientation to food and agriculture. In the U.S., the political institutions that govern food and agriculture have their roots in historical political precedents that date back to the 1860s, and later to the 1930s when the New Deal was promulgated. Farm interests have been entrenched in the U.S. political system for quite some time, and they cannot be easily removed.

There is a general rule for successful policies: Align incentives with objectives. A corollary to this principle is that objectives change over the course of economic development. For the United States in earlier eras, and for many developing economies in recent decades, meeting basic calorie needs has been the first order of business. This objective has been largely achieved through public investments in infrastructure (irrigation, roads), research and development, commodity support programs, incentives for private agribusiness development, and other supply-side measures.

With successful agricultural growth and rising incomes, many countries face a new set of food and nutrition challenges: eliminating “hidden hunger” (deficiencies in iron, vitamin A, calcium, zinc and other micronutrients), and abating the steady rise in obesity that results from a transition to diets rich in energy-dense carbohydrates, fats, and sugar. Hidden hunger affects some three billion people worldwide. It is prevalent among low-income households in almost all countries, impairs cognitive and physical development (especially among infants up to two years of age) and thus limits a nation’s educational and economic potential. Meanwhile, rates of obesity now surpass rates of energy-deficient hunger throughout the world, even in developing nations.

The objectives of food and agricultural policies in virtually all countries need to shift, on balance, from promoting staple food supplies to enhancing nutrition. I am not suggesting an abandonment of agriculture, but rather an enrichment of agriculture with more crop diversity to support the nutritional needs of all people. If improved nutrition is the objective, what are the correct incentives? Proper incentives will differ among countries, but will inevitably require a fundamental change in institutional structure. With a shift from supply- to demand orientation, there needs to be a transition from Ministries of Agriculture to Ministries of Food. After all, the main goals of a Ministry of Agriculture are to increase the volume of agricultural production and to improve economic growth in the agricultural sector. The main goal of a Ministry of Food, by contrast, is to enhance the nutrition and food security of the entire population.

Bittman, Pollan, Salvador, and de Schutter emphasize that replacing the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) with a “U.S. Department of Food, Health, and Wellbeing” would be difficult at best. It would require unprecedented political will and cooperation among parties. The same can be said for institutional change in agricultural ministries throughout the world. Regardless of the challenges, however, nothing will change until the conversation surrounding food policies, politics, and institutions takes a major turn.

FSE director Roz Naylor will give the opening plenary lecture at the 2nd International Conference on Global Food Security on October 12, 2015 at Cornell University. Naylor is William Wrigley Professor in Earth System Science, and senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. 

In addition to Naylor's lecture on "Food security in a commodity-driven world," several FSE researchers will give talks and poster sessions during the five-day conference, including professors Marshall Burke and Eric Lambin, visiting scholar Jennifer Burney, postdoctoral scholar Meha Jain, and doctoral candidate Elsa Ordway.