The BP Foundation has awarded a three-year, $1.95 million grant to Stanford University for a broad research program on modern energy markets. The foundation is funded by BP, formerly British Petroleum, one of the world's largest energy companies. The gift will support the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at the Stanford Institute for International Studies (SIIS). With the gift, BP joins the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, CA, as one of the program's core sponsors.

"This new partnership with BP will allow the program to accelerate research in several areas, including the design and operation of market-based policies to address the threats of global warming," said program director %people2%. "In addition to BP Foundation support, we look forward to learning more from BP's own experience as an energy company, which touches on every aspect of our program's research."

The agreement reflects a commitment by BP and Stanford to complement technical research with similar work on the legal, political and institutional dimensions of how societies derive value from energy, he added.

"Stanford University is undertaking ground-breaking research with the potential to have a profound impact on the organization of modern energy markets and the conduct of environmental policy," said Greg Coleman, BP's group vice president for environment, health, safety and security. "We hope that this is just the first step in a relationship which will become broader and deeper."

The agreement with Stanford is the latest in a series of BP partnerships with universities in the United Kingdom, the United States and China representing a total commitment of more than $100 million, according to BP officials. The Stanford agreement is expected to complement work under way at Princeton University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University, company officials added.

Founded in 2001, the SIIS Program on Energy and Sustainable Development focuses on the political, legal and institutional aspects of modern energy services, in collaboration with faculty from the Stanford School of Law and several university departments, including political science and economics. About half of the program's resources are devoted to research partnerships in key developing countries, including Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa. Program researchers have examined the emergence of a global business in natural gas, reforms of electric power markets and the supply of modern energy services to low-income rural households in developing countries.

The program is housed in the Center for Environmental Science and Policy - one of five major research centers at SIIS, the university's primary forum for interdisciplinary research on international issues and challenges.

STANFORD, California - The Bush administration wisely backed away this month from formally challenging Europe's ban on genetically modified foods. It made no sense to antagonize Europeans over the food they eat when they are pivotal to more weighty matters, such as a new resolution on Iraq.

Still, Washington's threat that it would file a case against the European Union at the World Trade Organization had palpable benefits. Even the countries with the most hostile policies on engineered food - France and Germany among them - took steps toward allowing the European Union to work on replacing the blanket ban with a new system for tracing and labeling engineered food.

But the decision to back off also means that American farmers are still denied access to the lucrative European market. European consumers still pay more for food than they should. And developing countries that could most benefit from engineered crops are still frightened that losing their "engineering-free" status will make it impossible to export food to Europe.

Yet the science on food safety is as certain as it ever gets: There is no known danger from eating engineered food.

Having backed down, the Bush administration will find it hard to make the threat of going to the trade organization credible again and to continue the momentum toward removing Europe's ban. But even harder for the administration will be keeping domestic politics at bay.

The biggest threat to the success of the U.S. strategy on engineered foods is in the American heartland, which is angling for a fight with Europe over the ban as the 2004 elections approach. Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa called the decision to defer a trade dispute "the usual snobbery" of a State Department "more concerned about international sensitivities than the American farmer." Two tactics should guide the effort to open Europe's markets. One is to let the Europeans lead their own reform.

The engineered foods available to consumers today mainly benefit farmers who can grow them at lower cost. These foods look and taste the same as their traditional counterparts. For rich consumers in Europe willing to pay a bit more, it is easy to focus on hypothetical risks and shun these products. But the next generation of engineered foods, already nearing the marketplace, will have healthful benefits for consumers - fruits that contain cancer-fighting lycopene, for instance - and this will make it harder for European countries to bar all these foods.

During the furor last summer over Zambia's rejection of genetically modified corn, prominent European politicians were forced to declare that these foods were safe - a blatant contradiction of Europe's own policies.

The other tactic is outreach to the developing world. In the poorest nations, agriculture provides the livelihood of most of the population, and agricultural research proves that genetic engineering can make crops that poor farmers grow both healthier and more productive.

Yet research on engineered crops and support for farmers who grow them lack money, not only in U.S. agricultural development and extension programs but also at the international agricultural research centers that were the engine of the first green revolution. In the last decade American support for international agricultural research has declined considerably.

An American program that would finance agricultural research on novel uses for genetically modified crops in developing countries would help those countries and could eventually help open European markets.

An American-led effort to pry open those markets would backfire. But one led by a developing country could succeed, as Europe considers the moral issues posed by barring food from a country which needs to sell its crops to survive. So far, few developing countries (South Africa is one exception) allow commercial planting of engineered crops. The United States needs to overcome the fears of the developing nations by growing such crops there and demonstrating how they could transform agriculture.