Stanford welcomes Cousin, a global hunger expert, to the Center on Food Security and the Environment.

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University is pleased to announce that former U.S. Ambassador and World Food Programme (WFP) Director Ertharin Cousin will serve as this year’s Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer and Visiting Fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE).  

Cousin brings over 25 years of experience addressing hunger and food security strategies on both a national and international scale. As U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture, she focused on advocating for longer-term solutions to food insecurity and hunger, and at WFP she addressed the challenges of food insecurity in conflict situations.

“Dr. Cousin’s outstanding leadership at the WFP and extensive experience in public service exemplifies the attributes we seek for Payne Lecturers,” says FSI Director Michael McFaul. The Payne Distinguished Lectureship is awarded to scholars with international reputations as leaders, with an emphasis on visionary thinking, practical problem solving, and the capacity to clearly articulate an important perspective on the global political and social situation. Past Payne Lecturers include Bill Gates, Nobel Laureate Mohamed El Baradei, UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot, and novelist Ian McEwan.

As a visiting fellow with FSE, Cousin will be working to further her research focus on global food security and humanitarian efforts. In November 2015, FSE welcomed Cousin as the featured speaker in their Food and Nutrition Symposium series, where she presented her paper “Achieving food security and nutrition for the furthest behind in an era of conflict and climate change.” FSE Director, Roz Naylor, sees Cousin’s appointment as a pivotal opportunity for FSE and FSI to advance a global agenda on food security and human rights. “Ertharin Cousin is one of the most inspirational leaders we could ever hope to attract to Stanford as a year-long visitor,” Naylor says.

“This is a truly humbling, yet exciting prospect,” says Cousin. “This position provides an opportunity for scholarly work and dialogue with distinguished academics across Stanford's schools and policy institutes.  I also look forward to the opportunity to convene thought leaders from a broad variety of backgrounds, who can help us explore some of the intractable issues plaguing humanitarian and development practitioners today.”

Following the completion of her term with the WFP, Cousin accepted an appointment as a Distinguished Fellow with The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which conducts research on food and agriculture, global cities, economics, energy, immigration, security, public opinion, and water. Cousin hopes her appointments can provide a unique collaborative opportunity to expand her work on food security and nutrition issues.

“In my career I have never before been given the opportunity of pursuing intellectual inspiration. Just thinking about the ‘what’s possible’ gives me genuine pleasure,” Cousin said.

About FSE

The Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) is a research center at Stanford University, jointly funded by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

By using high-res images taken by the latest generation of compact satellites, Stanford scientists have developed a new capability for estimating crop yields from space. Measuring yields could improve productivity and eventually reduce hunger.

Stanford researchers have developed a new way to estimate crop yields from space, using high-resolution photos snapped by a new wave of compact satellites.

The approach, detailed in the Feb. 13 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help estimate agricultural productivity and test intervention strategies in poor regions of the world where data are currently extremely scarce.

“Improving agricultural productivity is going to be one of the main ways to reduce hunger and improve livelihoods in poor parts of the world,” said study-coauthor Marshall Burke, an assistant professor of Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. “But to improve agricultural productivity, we first have to measure it, and unfortunately this isn’t done on most farms around the world.”

Improved satellites

Earth-observing satellites have been around for over three decades, but most of the imagery they capture has not been of high enough resolution to visualize the very small agricultural fields typical in developing countries. Recently, however, satellites have shrunk in both size and cost while simultaneously improving in resolution, and today there are several companies competing to launch into space refrigerator- and shoebox-sized satellites that take high-resolution images of Earth.

“You can get lots of them up there, all capturing very small parts of the land surface at very high resolution,” said study-coauthor David Lobell, an associate professor of Earth system science. “Any one satellite doesn’t give you very much information, but the constellation of them actually means that you’re covering most of the world at very high resolution and at very low cost. That’s something we never really had even a few years ago.”

Accurate predictions

In the new study, Burke and Lobell set out to test whether the images from this new wave of satellites are good enough to reliably estimate crop yields. The pair focused on an area in western Kenya where there are a lot of smallholder farmers that grow maize, or corn, on small, half-acre or one-acre lots. “This was an area where there was already a lot of existing field work,” Lobell said. “It was an ideal site to test our approach.”

The scientists compared two different methods for estimating agricultural productivity yields using satellite imagery. The first approach involved “ground truthing,” or conducting ground surveys to check the accuracy of yield estimates calculated using the satellite data, which was donated by the company Terra Bella. For this part of the study, Burke and his field team spent weeks conducting house-to-house surveys with his staff, talking to farmers and gathering information about individual farms.

“We get a lot of great data, but it’s incredibly time consuming and fairly expensive, meaning we can only survey at most a thousand or so farmers during one campaign,” said Burke, who is also a Center Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “If you want to scale up our operation, you don’t want to have to recollect ground survey data everywhere in the world.”

For this reason, the team also tested an alternative “uncalibrated” approach that did not depend on ground survey data to make predictions. Instead, it uses a computer model of how crops grow, along with information on local weather conditions, to help interpret the satellite imagery and predict yields.

“Just combining the imagery with computer-based crop models allows us to make surprisingly accurate predictions, based on the imagery alone, of actual productivity on the field,” Burke said.

The researchers have plans to scale up their project and test their approach across more of Africa. “Our aspiration is to make accurate seasonal predictions of agricultural productivity for every corner of sub-Saharan Africa,” Burke said. “Our hope is that this approach we’ve developed using satellites could allow a huge leap in in our ability to understand and improve agricultural productivity in poor parts of the world.”

Lobell is also the deputy director of Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

Funding for the study, titled “Satellite-based assessment of yield variation and its determinants in smallholder African systems,” was provided by AidData at the College of William and Mary, the USAID Global Development Lab and the Center for Effective Global Action.