National Security Consequences of U.S. Oil Dependency, a report by the Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force on Energy, concludes that the “lack of sustained attention to energy issues is undercutting U.S. foreign policy and U.S. national security.” The report goes on to examine how America’s dependence on imported oil—which currently comprises 60 percent of consumption— increasingly puts it into competition with other energy importers, notably the rapidly growing economies of China and India.

The task force was chaired jointly by James R. Schlesinger, a former secretary of defense and secretary of energy, and John Deutch, former director of Central Intelligence and undersecretary of energy, and drew from industry, academia, government, and NGOs. PESD Director David Victor directed the task force and FSI senior fellow by courtesy James Sweeney, director of Stanford’s new Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency, served as a member.

The task force unanimously concluded that incentives are needed to slow and eventually reverse the growth in petroleum consumption, particularly in the transportation sector, but was unable to agree on which specific incentives—such as gasoline tax-funded energy technology R&D, more stringent and broadly applied Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) standards, and a cap-and-trade permit system for gasoline—would most effectively achieve this result.

The task force report included additional recommendations regarding the supply and consumption of energy including the following:

• Encourage oil supply from all sources
• Promote better management and governance of oil revenues
• Remove the protectionist tariff on imported ethanol
• Increase the efficiency of oil and gas consumption in the United States and elsewhere
• Switch from oil-derived products to alternatives such as biofuels
• Make the oil and gas infrastructure more efficient and secure
• Increase investment in energy technology R&D
• Promote the proper functioning and efficiency of energy markets
• Revitalize international institutions such as the International Energy Agency (IEA)

The report stressed that the U.S. government must reorganize to integrate energy issues with foreign policy to address the threats to national security created by energy dependence. The task force offered a number of recommendations to better promote energy issues in foreign policy deliberations as follows:

• Establish an energy security directorate at the National Security Council to lead an interagency process to influence the discussion and thinking of the NSC principals
• Fully inform and engage the secretary of energy on all foreign policy matters with an important energy aspect
• Include energy security issues in the terms of reference of all planning studies at the NSC, Defense, State, and the intelligence community

The task force restricted its inquiry to the challenges of managing U.S. and global dependence on imported oil and gas and did not address other important energy security issues such as nuclear proliferation and global warming.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to present estimations of indicators of direct and indirect interventions of China's government in agriculture. In order to put these indicators in context, the paper reviews China's experience with policy reforms since the 1950s and the measures the effects of these reforms on the agriculture sector. Unfortunately, due to data constraints, we can only produce quantitative measures of distortions since the early 1980s, that is for the past 25 years. Due to the nature of China's agricultural experience over the last six decades, this review emphasizes the sectoral and macroeconomic policies and elements of the institutional framework that have influenced the incentive framework facing the sector and factor markets. The tradeand price/marketing-policy-related changes in incentives for different products are reflected in estimated rates of government assistance (Nominal Rates of Assistance, NRAs, Direct Rates of Assistances, DRAs and consumer subsidies).

China has been one of the leaders in agricultural biotechnology research and the adoption of transgenic plants. Despite this, critics argue that Chinese biotechnology policies could be improved to provide more benefits to farmers and more incentives to companies for greater research. The objective of the paper is to examine if policy changes could improve the welfare of producers and consumers and others in the cotton industry. The paper first reviews recent changes in laws and policies that affect China's plant biotechnology sector, IPR legislation, changes in bio-safety regulation and seed industry reforms. Next, using a primary data set collected from more than 1700 plots from a sample of farmers in northern China in 1999, 2000 and 2001, we econometrically estimate the effect of changes to intellectual property rights (IPR), bio-safety regulation and seed industry reform on farmer pesticide use and yields. The results are used as the basis of a simulation exercise designed to measure the size and distribution of the benefits (and costs) of reform. We find that improvements to the IPR environment, enhanced enforcement of China's bio-safety management regulation and greater commercialization of the seed industry positively affect the benefit of producers, consumers and technology providers.