Food Markets
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The supermarket revolution has arrived in China and is spreading as fast as or faster than anywhere in the world. As the demand for vegetables, fruit, nuts and other high valued products has risen, urban retailers are handling increasingly more of these high value commodities. The experience of many developing countries suggests that there could be serious distributional impacts of the emergence of supermarkets. And, in China, as elsewhere in the world, there is concern among policy makers and academics that poor, small farmers might be excluded from the market for horticulture commodities.

The main goal of our paper is to understand what types of farmers have been able to participate in the horticultural revolution, how they interact with markets and how supply chains affect their production decisions and incomes. We also want to understand if (and if so, then how) the rise of supermarkets have changed supply chains. Our analysis uses spatially sampled data from 200 communities and 500 households in the Greater Beijing area and supplemented by data collected in Shandong Province, China's fruit and vegetable basket. In contrast to fears of some researchers, we find small and poor farmers have actively participate in the emergence of China's horticulture economy. Moreover, there has been almost no penetration of modern wholesalers or retailers into rural communities. We also conducted surveys and interviews in wholesale markets and with procurement agents in Beijing supermarket chains and document the fact that supply chain shifts have only affected the downstream segments of food markets and China's wholesale markets (midstream in the food supply chain) are only being affected marginally.

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Working Papers
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Scott Rozelle

Energy and Environment Building
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Stanford CA 94305

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Professor, Earth System Science
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR)
Affiliate, Precourt Institute of Energy
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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.

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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.

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Journal Articles
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Science
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Rosamond L. Naylor
Henning Steinfeld

The global trade in grain and meat between nations is extensive and is projected to grow considerably in the short term. The concept and quantification of "virtual water" involved in these trade exchanges has led to new insights of the larger consequences of global transfers in commodities. FSE will host a small international team of scholars, including economists, ecologists, and livestock specialists to scope out this issue and to expand this concept to include energy and nutrients. By documenting trends, developing scenarios for the future, the group is proposing ways to achieve desired outcomes in a way that is sustainable for the life systems needed to fuel industrial livestock systems.

Richard and Rhoda Goldman Conference Room

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El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events exert significant influence on Southeast Asian rice output and markets. This paper measures ENSO effects on Indonesia's national and regional rice production and on world rice prices, using the August Niño 3.4 sea surface temperature anomaly (SSTA) to gauge climate variability. It shows that each degree Celsius change in the August SSTA produces a 1,318,000 metric ton effect on output and a $21/metric ton change in the world price for lower quality rice. Of the inter-annual production changes due to SSTA variation, 90% occur within 12 provinces, notably Java and South Sulawesi. New data and models offer opportunities to understand the agricultural effects of ENSO events, to reach early consensus on coming ENSO effects, and to use forecasting to improve agencies' and individuals' capacity to mitigate climate effects on food security. We propose that Indonesia hold an "ENSO summit" each September to analyse the food-security implications of upcoming climate events.

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Journal Articles
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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies
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Rosamond L. Naylor
Whitney L. Smith

Meat production is projected to double by 2020 due to increased incomes, population growth, and rising per capita global consumption of meat. In order to meet this demand, industrialized animal production systems are proliferating and grain production for feed is expanding. 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.

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Senior Fellow, Emerita, Stanford Woods Institute and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies,
William Wrigely Professor, Emerita, Department of Environmental Social Sciences
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Rosamond (Roz) Naylor is the William Wrigley Professor, Emerita, of Global Environmental Policy in the Doerr School of Sustainability; and founding Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) at Stanford University. Her research focuses on policies and practices to improve global food security and protect the environment on land and at sea. She has been involved in numerous field-level research projects around the world with her students and has published widely on issues related to global food systems, food policy, and aquaculture. She is the co-chair of The Blue Food Assessment, an international initiative aimed at providing a comprehensive scientific evaluation of the sustainability, nutrition, equity, and justice dimensions of aquatic foods cultured and captured in freshwater and marine environments within the global food system. She is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Fellow of the Ecological Society of America (ESA), a Pew Marine Fellow, and a Leopold Leadership Fellow. She is also the Chair of the Board of Directors for the Aspen Global Change Institute and a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for Oceana. At Stanford, she teaches courses on The World Food Economy, Human Society and Environmental Change, and Food and Security.
 

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The Yaqui Valley, in Sonora, Mexico is a region of rapid demographic, economic, and ecological change in both upland and coastal areas. Situated on the west coast of mainland Mexico on the Gulf of California, the Valley currently comprises 225,000 has of irrigated wheat-based agriculture: recently adding aquaculture to its landscape. It is the birthplace of the Green Revolution for wheat and one of Mexico's most productive breadbaskets.

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