Japan’s Public Universal Health Insurance System Reform: Lessons for Achieving and Maintaining Universal Health Care Coverage
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Small farmers can make the most of Africa's land
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In Kenya, 11 million people suffer from malnourishment. Twenty percent of children younger than five are underweight, and nearly one in three are below normal height. In a typical day, the average Kenyan consumes barely half as many calories as the average American.
But Kenya – and other underfed countries throughout Sub-Saharan Africa – have more than enough land to grow the food needed for their hungry populations.
The juxtaposition of food deprivation and land abundance boils down to a failure of national agriculture policies, says Thom Jayne, professor of international development at Michigan State University. Governments haven’t helped small farmers acquire rights to uncultivated land or use the land they own more productively, he said.
Speaking earlier this month at a symposium organized by the Center on Food Security and the Environment, Jayne said lifting African farmers out of poverty will require a new development approach.
The focus, he said, should be on increasing smallholder output and putting idle land to work in the hands of the rural poor.
Much of Sub-Saharan Africa’s fertile land, Jayne explained, falls under the ownership of state governments or wealthy investors who leave large tracts of land unplanted.
Meanwhile, population density in many rural areas exceeds the estimated carrying capacity for rainfed agriculture – approximately 500 persons per square kilometer, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Above this density threshold, farm sizes become so small, farming becomes economically unsustainable.
“As farm size shrinks, it’s increasingly difficult to produce a surplus,” Jayne said. “As it’s difficult to produce a surplus, it becomes difficult to finance investments in fertilizer and other inputs that could help you intensify.”
Agricultural development policies, Jayne said, have exacerbated these problems. One Zambian fertilizer subsidy program, for example, delivered support payments to over 50 percent of farms greater than five hectares in size – but only reached 14 percent of farmers whose holdings measured one hectare or smaller.
“This was a poverty reduction program that was targeted to large farms,” Jayne said. “Where’re the allocations to R&D appropriate to one hectare farms, tsetse fly control, vet services, all the things that are going to make that one hectare farm more productive?”
He stressed that investments in small farms could reduce poverty.
“Fifty to seventy percent of the population in these countries is engaged in agriculture,” he said. “There aren’t very many levers to reduce poverty and get growth processes going except to focus on the activities that that fifty to seventy percent are primarily engaged in.”
Smallholder-based growth strategies delivered stunning results in Green Revolution-era India – while large-farm strategies in Latin American countries have largely failed to alleviate rural poverty, he said.
Symposium commentator Byerlee, a rural policy expert and former lead economist for the World Bank, agreed with Jayne. In particular, Byerlee expressed skepticism about the benefit of large land investments by foreign agricultural interests.
“The social impacts aren’t going to be very much,” he said of the large-scale mechanized farming operations favored by foreign investors.
“They don’t create many jobs,” he said. “That’s really what we should be focusing on in terms of poverty reduction – job creation.”
Byerlee also stressed the need to formalize Sub-Saharan Africa’s land tenure systems. Currently, he said, about eighty percent of Africa’s land is titled informally under “customary” rights.
“When you have this population pressure, and on top of that you have commercial pressures coming in from investors, this system is just not going to stand up,” he said. “If you had better functioning land markets, it could reduce the transaction costs for investors, allow smallholders to access land, and provide an exit strategy for people at the bottom end.”
Jayne suggested reforms and new policies should include mechanisms to help small farmers gain access to unused fertile land. He called for comprehensive audits of land resources in Sub-Saharan African nations, a tax on uncultivated arable acreage, and a transparent public auction to distribute idle state lands to small farmers.
Additionally, he said, governments can help by improving infrastructure in remote rural areas and clearing fertile land of pests – such as tsetse flies – that threaten crops and human health.
But whatever particular policies they choose to pursue, Jayne said, African governments cannot afford to ignore the problems associated with inequitable land distribution and low smallholder agricultural productivity and. Failure to implement broad-based, smallholder-focused growth strategies will result in “major missed opportunities to reduce poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa,” he said.
This was the seventh talk in FSE's Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series.
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Distinguished Visitor Lecture on Public Service and Citizenship by former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold
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The Haas Center for Public Service is pleased to have former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold as the first Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor. Feingold will deliver the Distinguished Visitor Lecture on Public Service and Citizenship on February 8, 2012.
His lecture will address his forthcoming book, While America Sleeps: A Wake-Up Call for the Post-9/11 Era. The book examines "what America has done wrong domestically and abroad since the terrorist attacks of September 11, and what steps must be taken to ensure that the next ten years are focused on the international problems that threaten America and its citizens."
Tickets are required for this event, even though it is free and open to the public. For tickets, click here.
Cemex Auditorium, Knight Management Center
Russ Feingold
Former U.S. Senator and the Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor, Haas Center for Public Service
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Lectures
Standards & Regulations for Yucca Mountain: What Went Wrong?
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About the topic: Standards and regulations for the management, transportation and disposal of radioactive materials have been key to the development of strategies for the handling and disposing of radioactive materials at the “back-end” of the nuclear fuel cycle. This presentation summarizes previous U.S. experience in developing a standard and regulations for the geologic disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The main purpose of a standard and its implementing regulations should be to protect human health and the environment, but the structure of the standard and regulations, as well as the standard-of-proof for compliance, should not extend beyond what is scientifically possible and reasonable. The demonstration of compliance must not only be compelling, but it must also be able to sustain scientific and public scrutiny. We can benefit from the sobering reality of how difficult it is to project the future behavior of a geologic repository over extended spatial and temporal scales that stretch over tens of kilometers and out to a million years.
About the Speaker: Rodney Ewing is the Edward H. Kraus Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan. He was appointed to the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board by President Obama on July 28, 2011.
He has faculty appointments in the departments of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Nuclear Engineering & Radiological Sciences and Materials Science & Engineering and is an Emeritus Regents' Professor at the University of New Mexico, where he was a member of the faculty from 1974 to 1997. He is a fellow of the Geological Society of America, the Mineralogical Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, the Geochemical Society, the American Ceramic Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Materials Research Society.
CISAC Conference Room
Rodney C. Ewing
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E203
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
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rewing1@stanford.edu
1946-2024
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security
Professor of Geological Sciences
Rod Ewing was the Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security and Co-Director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University. He was also the Edward H. Kraus Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, where he had faculty appointments in the Departments of Earth & Environmental Sciences, Nuclear Engineering & Radiological Sciences and Materials Science & Engineering. He was a Regents' Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico, where he was a member of the faculty from 1974 to 1997. Ewing received a B.S. degree in geology from Texas Christian University (1968, summa cum laude) and M.S. (l972) and Ph.D. (l974, with distinction) degrees from Stanford University where he held an NSF Fellowship. His graduate studies focused on an esoteric group of minerals, metamict Nb-Ta-Ti oxides, which are unusual because they have become amorphous due to radiation damage caused by the presence of radioactive elements. Over the past thirty years, the early study of these unusual minerals has blossomed into a broadly-based research program on radiation effects in complex ceramic materials. In 2001, the work on radiation-resistant ceramics was recognized by the DOE, Office of Science – Decades of Discovery as one of the top 101 innovations during the previous 25 years. This has led to the development of techniques to predict the long-term behavior of materials, such as those used in radioactive waste disposal.
He was the author or co-author of over 750 research publications and the editor or co-editor of 18 monographs, proceedings volumes or special issues of journals. He had published widely in mineralogy, geochemistry, materials science, nuclear materials, physics and chemistry in over 100 different ISI journals. He was granted a patent for the development of a highly durable material for the immobilization of excess weapons plutonium. He was a Founding Editor of the magazine, Elements, which is now supported by 17 earth science societies. He was a Principal Editor for Nano LIFE, an interdisciplinary journal focused on collaboration between physical and medical scientists. In 2014, he was named a Founding Executive Editor of Geochemical Perspective Letters and appointed to the Editorial Advisory Board of Applied Physics Reviews.
Ewing had received the Hawley Medal of the Mineralogical Association of Canada in 1997 and 2002, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, the Dana Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America in 2006, the Lomonosov Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2006, a Honorary Doctorate from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 2007, the Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America in 2015, Ian Campbell Medal of the American Geoscience Institute, 2015, the Medal of Excellence in Mineralogical Sciences from the International Mineralogical Association in 2015, the Distinguished Public Service Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America in 2019, and was a foreign Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was also a fellow of the Geological Society of America, Mineralogical Society of America, Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland, American Geophysical Union, Geochemical Society, American Ceramic Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Materials Research Society. He was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering in 2017.
He was president of the Mineralogical Society of America (2002) and the International Union of Materials Research Societies (1997-1998). He was the President of the American Geoscience Institute (2018). Ewing had served on the Board of Directors of the Geochemical Society, the Board of Governors of the Gemological Institute of America and the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
He was co-editor of and a contributing author of Radioactive Waste Forms for the Future (North-Holland Physics, Amsterdam, 1988) and Uncertainty Underground – Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste (MIT Press, 2006). Professor Ewing had served on thirteen National Research Council committees and board for the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that have reviewed issues related to nuclear waste and nuclear weapons. In 2012, he was appointed by President Obama to serve as the Chair of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, which is responsible for ongoing and integrated technical review of DOE activities related to transporting, packaging, storing and disposing of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste; he stepped down from the Board in 2017.
Co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation
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Shin and Izatt article explores Korean views of America
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U.S.-Korea relations are stronger than ever, but there has not always been support in Korea for Americans or for the alliance. As Korea has both general and presidential elections this year whose outcome might affect U.S.-Korea relations, it is important for U.S. policymakers to appreciate the complexity of Korean sentiments. A recent article by Gi-Wook Shin and Hilary Izatt in Asian Survey sheds new light on anti-American and anti-alliance sentiments of the 1990s and early 2000s.
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U.S. President Barack Obama talks with President Lee Myung-bak of the Republic of Korea during their meeting in the Oval Office, Oct. 13, 2011.
Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
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Democratic Transition and Development in the Arab World
The third ARD annual conference examineي the challenges, key issues, and ways forward for social and economic development in the Arab world during this period of democratic transition.
Day One - April 26, 2012
9:15-10:45am Opening Panel – International & Domestic Frameworks for Development
Welcoming Remarks: Larry Diamond and Lina Khatib, Stanford University
George Kossaifi, Dar Al-Tanmiyah:
Towards an Integrated Social Policy of the Arab Youth
10:45-11:00am Break
11:00-12:30am Session 1: Political Economy of Reform
Chair: Hicham Ben Abdallah, Stanford University
Mongi Boughzala, University of Tunis El-Manar:
Economic Reforms in Egypt and Tunisia: Revolutionary Change and an Uncertain Agenda
Abdulwahab Alkebsi, Center for International Private Enterprise:
Answering Calls for Economic Dignity
12:30-1:30pm Lunch
1:30-3:00pm Session 2: Oil-Dependent Economies and Social and Political Development
Chair: Larry Diamond, Stanford University
Hedi Larbi, World Bank:
Development and Democracy in Transition Oil-rich Countries in MENA
Ibrahim Saif, Carnegie Middle East Center:
Lessons from the Gulf's Twin Shocks
3:00-3:30pm Break
3:30-5:00pm Session 3: Youth, ICTs, and Development Opportunities
Chair: Ayca Alemdaroglu, Stanford University
Loubna Skalli-Hanna, American University:
Youth and ICTs in MENA: Development Alternatives and Possibilities
Hatoon Ajwad Al-Fassi, King Saud University:
Social Media in Saudi Arabia, an era of youth social representation
Day Two - April 27, 2012
9:00-10:30am Session 1: Civil Society Development
Chair: Sean Yom, Temple University
Laryssa Chomiak, Centre d’Etudes Maghrebines à Tunis (CEMAT):
Civic Resistance to Civil Society: Institutionalizing Dissent in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia
Rihab Elhaj, New Libya Foundation:
Building Libyan Civil Society
10:30-11:00am Break
11:00-12:30pm Session 2: Democratic Transition and the Political Development of Women
Chair: Katie Zoglin, Human Rights Lawyer
Valentine Moghadam, Northeastern University:
The Gender of Democracy: Why It Matters
Amaney Jamal, Princeton University:
Reforms in Personal Status Laws and Women’s Rights in the Arab World
12:30-1:30pm Lunch
1:30-3:00pm Session 3: Minority Rights as a Key Component of Development
Chair: Lina Khatib, Stanford University
Mona Makram-Ebeid, American University in Cairo:
Challenges Facing Minority Rights in Democratic Transition (title TBC)
Nadim Shehadi, Chatham House:
The Other Turkish Model: Power Sharing and Minority Rights in the Arab Transitions
3:00-3:30pm Break
3:30-4:45pm Session 4: Towards Integrated Development in the Arab World
Chair: Larry Diamond, Stanford University
Closing roundtable discussion: Scenarios for integrated development
4:45-5:45pm Reception
Bechtel Conference Center
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