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.

A full day of speeches, discussions, and interaction on critical international issues.

MAIN SPEAKERS

Samuel R. Berger, Chairman of Stonebridge International and former National Security Advisor

Hans Blix, Chairman, Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission and former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq

Paul Collier, Professor of Economics, Oxford University

Philip Zelikow, Counselor of the Department of State and former Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission

CHECK IN 7:30 AM

BREAKFAST & WELCOME 8 AM - 9 AM

WELCOME

John Hennessy, President, Stanford University

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

Coit D. Blacker, SIIS Director, and William J. Perry, former Secretary of Defense

MORNING PLENARY SESSIONS 9 AM - 12:30 PM

Hans Blix on the risks of a new nuclear arms race and Paul Collier on governance and democracy.

LUNCH 1 PM

SPEAKER

Philip Zelikow, The United States and the World

AFTERNOON SESSIONS 2:30 PM - 5:45 PM

Breakout sessions with Stanford faculty, policy-makers, international academics, and journalists, on issues such as reform of the United Nations, our energy future, U.S. policy in Korea, the future of U.S./European relations, Russia, international criminal justice and peace, global climate change, and international responses to infectious diseases.

PARTICIPATING STANFORD FACULTY & SCHOLARS INCLUDE

Donald Kennedy, Larry Diamond, Michael Armacost, Gi-Wook Shin, Stephen Stedman, Scott Sagan, Christopher Chyba, Lynn Eden, David Victor, Allen Weiner, Alan Garber, Amir Eshel, Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Doug Owens, John McMillan, and Dan Okimoto.

RECEPTION 6 PM

DINNER 7 PM

SPEAKER

Samuel R. Berger, U.S. Foreign Policy: The Road Ahead.

China's rapid growth and increasingly close integration with world markets is transforming Northeast and Southeast Asian regional production and trade. Southeast Asia's relatively resource-abundant economies are expected to lose comparative advantage in low-skill, labor-intensive manufacturing activities while gaining comparative advantage in natural resource products. The latter shift will increase incentives to exploit and export the products of forestry, fisheries, and agriculture.

What are the implications for long-run growth and welfare, particularly in the poorest and least industrialized economies, including Indonesia and Vietnam? How will this trend interact with the other major phenomenon sweeping through Southeast Asia, i.e., decentralization? With reduced national authority and minimal local accountability, the potential for disastrous rates of resource exploitation is high. A race to liquidate natural resource assets, if sufficiently pronounced, could expose parts of the region to a new variant of the "natural resource curse" - the idea that resource-abundant economies grow more slowly than others.

Ian Coxhead is an economist and serves as director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His specialty is the economic development of Southeast Asia. His many publications on trade, development and the environment include The Open Economy and the Environment: Development, Trade and Resources in Asia (2003, with Sisira Jayasuriya). Prof. Coxhead's current research features the impacts of globalization, regional growth, and domestic policy reforms on the structures of production and employment, issues of poverty and the environment, and the exploitation of natural resources in Vietnam and the Philippines.

This meeting will focus on the intersection of two crucial challenges for the organization of energy infrastructures in the developing world. First, for nearly two decades most major developing countries have struggled to introduce market forces in their electric power systems. In every case, that effort has proceeded more slowly than reformers originally hoped; the outcomes have been hybrids that are far from the efficiency and organization of the "ideal" textbook model for a market-based power system. Second, growing concern about global climate change has put the spotlight on the need to build an international regulatory regime that includes strong incentives for key developing countries to control their emissions of greenhouse gases. In most of those countries, the power sector is the largest single source of emissions. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol included mechanisms that would reward developing nations that cut emissions, but so far those systems have functioned far short of their imagined potential. A growing chorus of analysts and policy makers are expressing dissatisfaction with those existing mechanisms and clamoring for alternatives.

This meeting will offer diagnoses of what has gone wrong and what opportunities have nonetheless emerged. It will focus on practical solutions and look at the prospects for different technologies to meet growing demand for power while minimizing the ecological footprint of power generation. It will engage scholars who are studying the industrial organization of the electric power sector (and other infrastructures) in developing countries as well as those who study the effectiveness of international legal regimes. It will engage practitioners, including regulators and energy policy makers. Our aims are not only to focus on new theories that are emerging to explain the organization of the power sector and the design of meaningful international institutions, but also to identify practical implications for investors, regulators, and policy makers.

Presentations will include recent results from the research of Stanford Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. We will present the main findings from a comprehensive study of power market reform in five developing countries (Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa). We will also show the results from a detailed analysis of the greenhouse gas emissions from two key states in India and three provinces in China--a study conducted jointly with the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. In addition, we will present new conclusions from ongoing work that focuses on strategies for engaging developing countries in the global climate regime. Among the topics considered will be the prospects for accelerating the introduction of natural gas into electric power systems--especially those in China and India where the present domination of coal leads to relatively high emissions.