There is little disagreement now that the climate is changing, and that such changes could fundamentally affect humanity's collective ability to feed itself. However, there is little systematic knowledge of where climate effects will hit hardest and how agriculture might adapt to a rapidly changing climate.
Most reduction fisheries that produce fishmeal and fish oil have already reached or exceeded sustainable catch levels and will be placed under further pressure as the aquaculture industry grows. At the same time that research into alternative sources of nutrition for piscivorous aquaculture species is progressing, several laws and regulations are taking shape that address the issue of aquaculture feed practices, including the U.S. National Offshore Aquaculture Act (H.R. 2010, S. 1609), the California Sustainable Oceans Act (SB 201), and the development of organic aquaculture standards by the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB). Other nations with expanding aquaculture industries are also beginning to take notice of this issue and are investigating alternative feed sources.
At this pivotal time, the Stanford meeting will bring together a small group of forward-thinking researchers, environmental non-profits, aquaculture producers, feed developers, and others who are striving toward sustainable feed solutions. The goal is to develop recommendations and a guiding direction for achieving sustainable feed inputs, incorporating current science, economics, and policy. The meeting seeks to:
We hope the meeting will facilitate the cross-fertilization of ideas on sustainable feeds from people in different sectors and begin to provide some clarity and direction useful to policymakers. Although many experts have acknowledged the problem of increasing feed demands, and while alternative feed sources are a growing research field, there are few specific recommendations on how to achieve sustainable feed inputs. From the discussion at this workshop, we intend to produce specific recommendations to guide legislation and regulation on feeds, with the goal of improving the sustainability of aquaculture feed practices.
FSE - Stanford University
Energy and Environment Building
473 Via Ortega
Stanford CA 94305
David Lobell is the Benjamin M. Page Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Earth System Science and the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. He is also the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy and Research (SIEPR).
Lobell's research focuses on agriculture and food security, specifically on generating and using unique datasets to study rural areas throughout the world. His early research focused on climate change risks and adaptations in cropping systems, and he served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report as lead author for the food chapter and core writing team member for the Summary for Policymakers. More recent work has developed new techniques to measure progress on sustainable development goals and study the impacts of climate-smart practices in agriculture. His work has been recognized with various awards, including the Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union (2010), a Macarthur Fellowship (2013), the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences (2022) and election to the National Academy of Sciences (2023).
Prior to his Stanford appointment, Lobell was a Lawrence Post-doctoral Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He holds a PhD in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University and a Sc.B. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University.
Global meat production is becoming increasingly industrialized, spatially concentrated, and geographically detached from the agricultural land base. This Policy Forum reviews the process of livestock industrialization and globalization, and its consequences for water, nitrogen, and species-rich habitats in meat- and feed-producing regions often vastly separated in space. It argues that pricing and other policy mechanisms which reflect social costs of resource use and ecological change are needed to re-couple livestock and land in producer countries, drawing on examples from Europe and the United States. It also argues that consumers can play an important role in setting a sustainable course.
Encina Hall, C149
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Alberto Díaz-Cayeros is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and co-director of the Democracy Action Lab (DAL), based at FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL). His research interests include federalism, poverty relief, indigenous governance, political economy of health, violence, and citizen security in Mexico and Latin America.
He is the author of Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America (Cambridge, reedited 2016), coauthored with Federico Estévez and Beatriz Magaloni, of The Political Logic of Poverty Relief (Cambridge, 2016), and of numerous journal articles and book chapters.
He is currently working on a project on cartography and the developmental legacies of colonial rule and governance in indigenous communities in Mexico.
From 2016 to 2023, he was the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University, and from 2009 to 2013, Director of the Center for US-Mexican Studies at UCSD, the University of California, San Diego.
The European Forum, in association with the European Union Center of California at Scripps College, is hosting a workshop on "The EU, the US and the WTO" on February 28 and March 1, 2003. The aim of the workshop is to conduct an in-depth discussion in an academic setting about the current state of the WTO, the relationship between the EU and the US and that institution, and the prospects for a successful Doha round of trade negotiations. Invited participants from the US and the EU, including economists, political scientists and lawyers will be at the meeting.
The workshop will address five topics in its sessions. After a keynote address on Friday morning the workshop will look at the WTO as an evolving institution, the EU and the WTO, and the US and the WTO. The Workshop recommences on Saturday at 9:00am, to discuss transatlantic cooperation and the WTO and prospects for the Doha Round.
CISAC Conference Room
Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA, 94305-6044
Judith L. Goldstein is the Janet M. Peck Professor of International Communication and the Kaye University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. She is a member of the AAAS, is the current chair of the university faculty senate and the chair of the board for the journal International Organization. Her research focuses on international political economy, with a focus on trade politics. She has written and/or edited six book including Ideas, Interests and American Trade Policy and more recently The Evolution of the Trade Regime: Politics, Law and Economics of the GATT and the WTO. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals.
Her current research focuses on the issue of adjustment to global economic shocks, with a focus on employment issues. She has on going projects on tariff bargaining, on foreign policy attitudes and on globalization more generally.
Goldstein has a BA from the University of California Berkeley, a Masters degree from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from UCLA.
The overall goal of our paper is to explore this question of how China's policy will likely respond as the nation enters the WTO. Specifically, we will have three objectives. First, we briefly review China's existing agriculture policy and past performance of China's agriculture and how it has changed during the past 20 years of reform. Next, we examine the main features of the agreement that China must adhere to as they enter WTO. Finally, we consider a number of possible ways that policy makers may respond, primarily focusing on the national government's viewpoint.
Global aquaculture production is growing rapidly, with production more than doubling in weight and by value from 1989 to 1998. With many capture fisheries catches peaking, scientists, governments, and international organizations all point to aquaculture as the most important means to increase global fish supplies.
The aquaculture industry in the United States, which is dominated by freshwater catfish (Ictalurus punctatus) production, generates about one billion dollars each year. Marine aquaculture comprises roughly one-third of U.S. production by weight, and despite rapid increases in salmon and clam production, growth of U.S. marine aquaculture has been slow on average. Efforts to develop marine aquaculture in the open ocean could catalyze future growth.
Aquaculture has a number of economic and other benefits. But if it is done without adequate environmental safeguards it can cause environmental degredation. The main environmental effects of marine aquaculture can be divided into the following five categories:
1) Biological Pollution: Fish that escape from aquaculture facilities may harm wild fish populations through competition and interbreeding, or by spreading diseases and parasites. Escaped farmed Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) are a particular problem, and may threaten endangered wild Atlantic salmon in Maine. In the future, farming transgenic, or genetically modified, fish may exacerbate concerns about biological pollution.
2) Fish for Fish Feeds: Some types of aquaculture use large quantities of wild-caught fish as feed ingredients, and thus indirectly affect marine ecosystems thousands of miles from fish farms.
3) Organic Pollution and Eutrophication: Some aquaculture systems contribute to nutrient loading through discharges of fish wastes and uneaten feed. Compared to the largest U.S. sources of nutrient pollution, aquaculture's contribution is small, but it can be locally significant.
4) Chemical Pollution: A variety of approved chemicals are used in aquaculture, including antibiotics and pesticides. Chemical use in U.S. aquaculture is low compared to use in terrestrial agriculture, but antibiotic resistance and harm to nontarget species are concerns.
5) Habitat Modification: Marine aquaculture spreads over 26,000 marine hectares, or roughly 100 square miles. Some facilities attract marine predators, and can harm them through accidental entanglement or intentional harassment techniques.
A number of technologies and practices are available to prevent or mitigate these environmental problems. Options to make U.S. aquaculture environmentally sustainable include:
Department of Political Science
Stanford University
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-26044
Jean C. Oi is the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics in the department of political science and a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. She is the founding director of the Stanford China Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Professor Oi is also the founding Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center at Peking University.
A PhD in political science from the University of Michigan, Oi first taught at Lehigh University and later in the Department of Government at Harvard University before joining the Stanford faculty in 1997.
Her work focuses on comparative politics, with special expertise on political economy and the process of reform in transitional systems. Oi has written extensively on China's rural politics and political economy. Her State and Peasant in Contemporary China (University of California Press, 1989) examined the core of rural politics in the Mao period—the struggle over the distribution of the grain harvest—and the clientelistic politics that ensued. Her Rural China Takes Off (University of California Press, 1999 and Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 1999) examines the property rights necessary for growth and coined the term “local state corporatism" to describe local-state-led growth that has been the cornerstone of China’s development model.
She has edited a number of conference volumes on key issues in China’s reforms. The first was Growing Pains: Tensions and Opportunity in China's Transformation (Brookings Institution Press, 2010), co-edited with Scott Rozelle and Xueguang Zhou, which examined the earlier phases of reform. Most recently, she co-edited with Thomas Fingar, Fateful Decisions: Choices That Will Shape China’s Future (Stanford University Press, 2020). The volume examines the difficult choices and tradeoffs that China leaders face after forty years of reform, when the economy has slowed and the population is aging, and with increasing demand for and costs of education, healthcare, elder care, and other social benefits.
Oi also works on the politics of corporate restructuring, with a focus on the incentives and institutional constraints of state actors. She has published three edited volumes related to this topic: one on China, Going Private in China: The Politics of Corporate Restructuring and System Reform (Shorenstein APARC, 2011); one on Korea, co-edited with Byung-Kook Kim and Eun Mee Kim, Adapt, Fragment, Transform: Corporate Restructuring and System Reform in Korea (Shorenstein APARC, 2012); and a third on Japan, Syncretism: The Politics of Economic Restructuring and System Reform in Japan, co-edited with Kenji E. Kushida and Kay Shimizu (Brookings Institution, 2013). Other more recent articles include “Creating Corporate Groups to Strengthen China’s State-Owned Enterprises,” with Zhang Xiaowen, in Kjeld Erik Brodsgard, ed., Globalization and Public Sector Reform in China (Routledge, 2014) and "Unpacking the Patterns of Corporate Restructuring during China's SOE Reform," co-authored with Xiaojun Li, Economic and Political Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2018.
Oi continues her research on rural finance and local governance in China. She has done collaborative work with scholars in China, including conducting fieldwork on the organization of rural communities, the provision of public goods, and the fiscal pressures of rapid urbanization. This research is brought together in a co-edited volume, Challenges in the Process of China’s Urbanization (Brookings Institution Shorenstein APARC Series, 2017), with Karen Eggleston and Wang Yiming. Included in this volume is her “Institutional Challenges in Providing Affordable Housing in the People’s Republic of China,” with Niny Khor.
As a member of the research team who began studying in the late 1980s one county in China, Oi with Steven Goldstein provides a window on China’s dramatic change over the decades in Zouping Revisited: Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County (Stanford University Press, 2018). This volume assesses the later phases of reform and asks how this rural county has been able to manage governance with seemingly unchanged political institutions when the economy and society have transformed beyond recognition. The findings reveal a process of adaptive governance and institutional agility in the way that institutions actually operate, even as their outward appearances remain seemingly unchanged.