Meeting the world’s need for food in the 21st century presents unprecedented challenges and opportunities. The global population is expected to grow toward 9 billion by 2050, and more families will live in middle-income countries and urban areas with expanding per capita consumption. At the same time, climate change and resource constraints will likely reduce crop and animal production in many locations, potentially creating greater disparities in incomes, food access, and nutrition around the world. Roz Naylor, a thought leader in global food security, will discuss the world’s future food dilemma and present a range of solutions focused on the diversification of food systems, improved input efficiencies, renewable energy use, new crop technologies, and policy adjustments. Her talk will demonstrate how food security, in its broadest form, is tied to security of many other kinds: energy, water, climate, health, the environment, and national security.

FSE director Roz Naylor’s research focuses on economic and biophysical dimensions of food security and environmental impacts of crop and animal production. Her extensive field research and published work span issues related to intensive crop production, aquaculture and livestock systems, biofuels, climate change, food price volatility, and food policy analysis. At Stanford, Naylor teaches courses on the world food economy, humanenvironment interactions, and sustainable agriculture.

Naylor's new book The Evolving Sphere of Food Security (Oxford University Press, September) brings together 19 Stanford scholars from across campus to explore the many faces and facets of global food security. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.

The annual Earth Matters lecture series is jointly sponsored by Stanford Continuing Studies and the Stanford School of Earth Sciences.

A reception in the lobby of Encina Hall will follow the event.

Bursting the Bubble: A Long Run Perspective

What are the long run drivers of global food prices? Given current market developments, what are the prospects for food price changes over the coming decades?

Thomas Hertel is Distinguished Professor of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University, where his research focuses on the global impacts of trade, climate and environmental policies. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Purdue University Research and Scholarship Distinction Award.  Professor Hertel is a former Cargill Visiting Fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford.

Dr. Hertel is a Fellow, and Past-President, of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA). He is also the founder and Executive Director of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) which now encompasses more than 10,000 researchers in 150 countries around the world (http://www.gtap.org). This Project maintains a global economic data base and an applied general equilibrium modeling framework which are documented in the book: Global Trade Analysis: Modeling and Applications, edited by Dr. Hertel, and published by Cambridge University Press in 1997.

Professor Hertel’s most recent research has focused on the impacts of climate change and mitigation policies on global trade, land use and poverty. During the 2011-12 year he was on leave at Stanford University, where he was engaged in inter-disciplinary research on these topics.

Previously, Professor Hertel has conducted research on the impacts of multilateral trade agreements, including the linkages between global trade policies and poverty in developing countries. His book: Poverty and the WTO (co-edited with L. Alan Winters) received the AAEA Quality of Communication award. Other AAEA awards include: Distinguished Policy Contribution and Outstanding Journal Article.

If the Food Price Bubble Burst, Would It Matter?

What are the economic and political implications of a bursting of the food price bubble?

Johan Swinnen is President of the International Association of Agricultural Economists, a Fellow of the AAEA (Association of (the US) Agricultural and Applied Economists ); a Fellow of the ERAE (European Association of Agricultural Economists). He is also President of The Beeronomics Society. He holds a Ph.D from Cornell University and a Honorary Doctorate from the Slovak Agricultural University.

He is currently Visiting Professor at the Centre for Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University and (since many years) Professor of Economics and Director of the LICOS-Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance -- a Centre of Excellence -- at the KU Leuven, Belgium. He is also Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), Brussels, where he directs the programme on EU agricultural and rural policy.

He was previously Lead Economist at the World Bank and Economic Advisor at the European Commission. He is a regular consultant for these organizations and for the OECD, FAO, the EBRD, and several Governments and was coordinator of several international research networks on food policy, institutional reforms, and economic development.

He has published widely on political economy, institutional reform, trade, global supply chains, product standards, agricultural policy and global food security. His publications have appeared in leading academic journals, such as the Journal of Economic Literature Science, and Nature.

This lecture is the first installment of FSE's Food and Nutrition Policy Symposium Series.

John W. (Jack) Rowe MD, an expert on health care economics and healthy aging, will be the inaugural speaker for the Stanford Center on Longevity Distinguished Lecture Series. Rowe is professor of health policy and management, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and former CEO of Aetna Inc.

Rowe’s lecture, “Myths and Realities of an Aging Society,” will be from 6 to 7 p.m. (reception at 5:30 p.m.), Tuesday, April 13.

Koret Distinguished Lecture Series: Lecture IV

From early 2012, South Korea-Japan relations worsened due to what many Koreans regard as a series of Japanese provocations involving historical and territorial disputes. Unfortunately, the neighbors failed to utilize the opportunity to improve the situation following leadership changes in both countries at the beginning of 2013. Today their bilateral relationship, long considered a cornerstone of peace and stability in Northeast Asia, appears to the worst since the normalization of diplomatic ties in 1965. Former Korean ambassador to Japan Shin Kak-soo will analyze the complicated structural reasons behind this downward spiral and explore whether differences over history can be addressed and an early diplomatic "reset" achieved.

Ambassador Shin has served various diplomatic positions during his thirty-five year career in foreign affairs, including service as ambassador to the State of Israel from 2006 to 2008 and to Japan from 2011 to 2013. He is currently a professor at the Korean National Diplomatic Academy and also a special research fellow at the Institute of Japanese Studies, Seoul National University.

The Koret Distinguished Lecture Series was established in 2013 with the generous support of the Koret Foundation. 

Koret Distinguished Lecture Series: Lecture III

South Korean President Park Geun-hye recently made headlines by declaring that Korean unification would represent a huge bonanza for both the Korean people and the international community, rather than pose unacceptable risks and costs, as some have argued. The core goal and ultimate aim of her trustpolitik toward North Korea is in fact the unification of the divided Korean Peninsula. Unification will end a highly abnormal situation, resolve the nuclear issue, and provide a peace dividend not only to the Korean people but also to the United States and countries in the region. Trustpolitik aims to achieve unification by establishing sustainable peace on the Korean Peninsula, inducing positive change in North Korea, and mobilizing international support for unification. Kim Hwang-sik, South Korea’s prime minister from 2010-2013, will lay out President Park’s vision for a unified Korea and her plan to achieve it, and explain why the United States should strongly support the effort. 

Born in South Jeolla Province in 1948, Kim Hwang-sik studied law at Marburg University in Germany and graduated from Seoul National University in 1971. He passed the National Judicial Examination in 1972 and then served as judge in district and high courts, becoming president of the Kwangju district court and, from 2005 to 2008, a Supreme Court justice. He served as chairman of the Board of Audit and Inspection from 2008 to 2010, and as President Lee Myung-bak’s prime minister from October 2010 to February 2013.

The Europe Center invites you to the inaugural annual lectures of this series by Adam Tooze, Barton M. Briggs Professor of History, Yale University. On the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, Adam Tooze will deliver three lectures about the history of the transformation of the global power structure that followed from Imperial Germany’s decision to provoke America’s declaration of war in 1917.  Tooze advances a powerful explanation of why the First World War rearranged political and economic structures across Eurasia and the British Empire, sowed the seeds of revolution in Russia and China, and laid the foundations of a new global order that began to revolve around the United States and the Pacific. These lectures will present an argument for why the fate of effectively the whole of civilization changed in 1917, and why the First World War’s legacy continues to shape our world today.

Titles and venues are listed below.

Wednesday, Apr 30, 2014, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: Koret Taube Room, Gunn-SIEPR
“Making Peace in Europe 1917-1919: Brest-Litovsk and Versailles”
Recent events in Ukraine pose the question, is a comprehensive peace for Europe, both East and West, possible? This lecture will address the first moment in which that question was posed, during and after World War I. In light of current events the lecture will focus on the influence of Russian power and powerlessness in shaping both the abortive effort to make peace in the East between Imperial Germany and Soviet Russia at Brest Litovsk - the first treaty to recognize the existence of an independent Ukraine - and the efforts to make peace in the West at Versailles and after. Returning to the period 1917-1923 suggests sobering conclusions about the stability of the order that we have taken for granted since 1991.

Thursday, May 1, 2014, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: Koret Taube Room, Gunn-SIEPR
“Hegemony: Europe, America and the Problem of Financial Reconstruction, 1916-1933”
Having established itself in the 19th century as the financial center of the world, Europe's sudden impoverishment by World War I came as a dramatic shock. The ensuing trans-Atlantic crises of the 1920s and early 1930s were not only the most severe but the most consequential in the history of Europe and the wider world. But, to this day there is substantial disagreement amongst both social scientists and historians as to the causes of the disaster. Was it American leadership or a failure of cooperation that was to blame? This lecture will argue the case for a revised and historicized version of the hegemonic failure thesis. The absence presence of American influence was crucial in determining Europe's fate.

Friday, May 2, 2014, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: Bechtel Conference Center
Followed by a reeception, 5:30 pm - 6:15 pm
“Unsettled Lands: The Interwar Crisis of Agrarian Europe”
Until the middle of the twentieth century Europe, like the rest of the world, was majority agrarian. And yet the most influential accounts of the interwar crisis, framed as they were by the industrial and urban world of the later twentieth-century Europe, tended to ignore this evident fact, focusing instead on workers and business-men, politicians and soldiers. This lecture will illustrate how brining the peasantry back in has the potential not only to throw new light on Europe's great epoch of crisis, but to open that history, beyond the Bloodlands to the wider world.

Tooze is the author of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) and Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001), among numerous other scholarly articles on modern European history.

This is a keynote speech open to the public during the Sixth Annual Koret Conference on "Engaging North Korea: Projects, Challenges, and Prospects."

The North Korean nuclear threat has now been with us for more than a quarter century.  Our policy of "strategic patience" seems more patient than strategic as the US waits for Pyongyang to meet certain preconditions before we return to the bargaining table.  But North Korea continues to develop both its nuclear weapons and missile systems, and there are no negotiations in sight.  What alternatives are there to our current approach?  If so, what might those look like?

Ambassador Bosworth is a former career diplomat, he served as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea, the Philippines, and Tunisia. Most recently, he served as U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy for the Obama administration. 

Koret Distinguished Lecture Series: Lecture II

If East Asia is to make its anticipated much greater contribution to the world political and economic order in the coming years, the states and the peoples of the region will have to make continuous efforts to maintain and increase respect for the common values of humanity. Key to this is building mutual trust through historical reconciliation and rectification, which is necessary to ensure regional peace and prosperity and contribute to the global good. In the process of constructing a "civil consensus" resting on such universal human values as democracy, human rights, development cooperation, environmental protection, and ensuring peace, we must consider the role that the intellectual community in Asia should play alongside other world citizens. In his talk, President Oh will re-examine the responsibility of education in general and universities in particular in cultivating future world citizens who share the goal of upholding humanity’s common values. 

Dr. Oh received his BA in Political Science from Seoul National University, and his MPA and PhD in Public Administration from New York University.

The Koret Distinguished Lecture Series was established in 2013 with the generous support of the Koret Foundation. 

The Korea Colloquium on History and Culture