Blaming leaders in America and abroad for not doing enough to combat climate change, former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said continued failure to tackle the problem will result in worldwide hunger, social unrest and political turmoil.

“Without action at the global level to address climate change, we will see farmers across Africa – and in many other parts of the world including here in America – forced to leave their land,” the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize winner told a crowd of about 1,400 people at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium on Thursday. “The result will be mass migration, growing food shortages, loss of social cohesion and even political instability.”

Citing numbers from the World Bank, Annan said rapidly rising food prices since 2010 have “pushed an additional 70 million people into extreme poverty.” He called a lack of food security for nearly 1 billion of the world’s population “an unconscionable moral failing” that is also a stumbling block to a strong international economy.

“It affects everything from the health of an unborn child to economic growth,” he said.

Annan’s talk, “Food Security Is a Global Challenge,” was delivered as part of a daylong conference on global underdevelopment sponsored by Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. The event drew the world’s leading experts in the field and featured panel discussions that explored the connections between global security and food supplies, health care and governance. Keynote speeches were delivered by Annan and Jeff Raikes, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates also planned to deliver a talk to a private audience.

The conference marked the launch of FSI’s Center on Food Security and the Environment.

“With this facility, and the creative thinkers and inquisitive minds for which Stanford is famous, you are well-equipped to undertake research which advances our knowledge and helps to shape our response to the many global challenges we face,” Annan said. “And with the resources at your disposal, you also have the capacity to actively engage to influence policy, implement solutions and thus improve the lives of the most vulnerable people on the planet.”

Annan also lauded government initiatives such as America’s Feed the Future program that focus on alleviating global hunger. He recently met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Raj Shah, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, to discuss ways to address food insecurity.

“If we pool our efforts and resources, we can finally break the back of this problem,” he said.

But he challenged wealthier nations to do more than pay lip service to the problem.

“We need to make sure that promises of extra support from richer countries are kept and involve fresh funds rather than the repackaging of existing financial commitments,” he said.

Annan, who is the chair of the Kofi Annan Foundation, the Africa Progress Panel, and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, said Africa represents both the greatest problem and the greatest promise when it comes to food security.

The continent is home to 60 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land, but cannot produce enough food to feed its own people, he said. But if Africa can grow just half the world’s average yield of staple crops like wheat, corn and rice, it would end up with a food surplus.

Transforming Africa into one of the world’s biggest crop producers will take more than supporting farmers, he said. It entails sound environmental stewardship.

 “I hope this is an area where the Center on Food Security and the Environment can make a major contribution to finding solutions,” Annan said.

Without those solutions, the future is bleak.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, where global warming brings the threat of persistent drought, current crop production is expected to be cut in half by the end of the century and 8 percent of the region’s fertile land is expected to dry up.

“Those arguing, here and elsewhere, for urgent action and a focus on opportunities to green our economies still find themselves drowned out by those with short-term and vested interests,” Annan said. “This lack of long-term collective vision and leadership is inexcusable. It has global repercussions, and it will be those least responsible for climate change – the poorest and most vulnerable – that will pay the highest price.”

Annan's speech was sponsored by FSI, Stanford in Government and the Stanford University Speakers Bureau.

Throughout the developing world, people are dying at alarming rates because they don't have basic necessities we often take for granted: enough food, clean water and health care.

Political instability and weak institutions are often to blame. Corruption, violence and lack of accountability keep the world’s poorest people from the chance to prosper.

Even as countries like China and India revel in their economic booms, the gap between rich and poor in those countries has never been wider. And those left behind often struggle on less than a dollar a day.

Researchers at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies are focusing on how to improve the quality of lives for those in the greatest need – the people caught in places of chronic underdevelopment.

“Our job is to take intellectual ideas and push them out into the real world where they can be tested and refined – or discarded. The impact of that can be transformational."

-Coit BlackerThey're helping children in rural China get the food they need to do well in school and land competitive jobs. They’re using cell phone technology to make sure people living in one of Africa’s largest slums have access to clean drinking water. They’re working with local governments in Latin America to improve medical care and educational opportunities for children.

FSI: Where disciplines come together

The success they have in fighting poverty takes more than a lone researcher focusing on a particular topic. It comes from economists working with doctors, political scientists collaborating with environmentalists and engineers sharing ideas with lawyers. And it comes from putting academic findings into the hands of policy makers.

As Stanford’s primary forum for research on international issues, FSI fosters the multidisciplinary match-ups that influence policy worldwide and make a difference in people’s lives. It provides the glue and the space for academics across Stanford’s campus to come together and develop ideas.

“Unless and until we can offer profound answers as to why such a large a portion of the world’s population lives on less than a dollar day, we won’t be able to help countries develop institutions for reliable self-governance,” says FSI Director Coit D. Blacker. “And we won’t have building blocks for stability in place. If you can’t feed your people, you can’t educate your people and you can’t sew together a social and governing structure to help them break from chronic underdevelopment.”

Action Fund grants: Sparking research, shaping policy

FSI’s Global Underdevelopment Action Fund provides seed grants to help faculty members design research experiments and conduct fieldwork in some of the world’s poorest places.

The program awards up to $40,000 to researchers creating projects that tackle issues like hunger, poverty and poor governance.  Since it was established last year, the Action Fund has awarded $436,000 to nine researchers who have designed at total of 11 programs. 

With fresh findings, FSI researchers are in a unique position to influence global policy. Drawing on the FSI’s network of faculty and alumni who came from and are now working with governments around the world, scholars have the opportunity to direct their research to those who are able to affect change.

“Our job is to take intellectual ideas and push them out into the real world where they can be tested and refined – or discarded,” Blacker says. “The impact of that can be transformational.”

The world’s leading experts on global underdevelopment gather at Stanford today to explain and explore the links between international security and universal access to food, health care and water. The daylong conference was streamed live from 8:30 a.m. until 5 p.m PST.

Despite an increase in food production and incomes worldwide, one in seven of the world’s 7 billion people is hungry.

Upheavals in food prices and the global economy, combined with a growing population’s demands for food and energy, are widening the gap between rich and poor. And that rift is creating new challenges to feed the hungry – most of whom live in remote, rural areas – without depleting the planet’s natural resources.

Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) is dedicated to addressing these challenges. Started as a research program in 2006, FSE is celebrating its launch today as a full-scale research center. The celebration is part of a larger conference hosted by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) focused on links between international security, food and health care. The institutional elevation signifies the growing importance of food security issues at Stanford and worldwide. And it positions FSE to become the leading academic institution in the field of food security.

“Food security has quickly risen as a critical global issue comparable to international security, global health, and democratization, and will remain a pressing issue in the years head,” said Rosamond L. Naylor, director of FSE. “We’re looking at how to raise people out of poverty so they can afford more food, how to stabilize prices so food isn’t too expensive, and how to grow more food without destroying the environment.”

In an introduction given at FSE’s Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series last winter, Stanford President John Hennessy remarked, “Stanford was founded on the idea that its teaching and research could have a broader impact on society, and the area of food security certainly has that kind of possibility.”

“Our work on hunger, rural poverty, and the environmental impact of food production is critical not only to the future of our lives here in the United States but to the lives of people around the world,” said Hennessey. “We will need to bring together teams of experts from different disciplines if we are going to make important contributions to this work.”

FSE’s dual affiliation with the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Woods Institute for the Environment supports these collaborations, and is a key factor to the center’s expansion. The center is led by Naylor and its deputy director, Walter P. Falcon. Both share a long history at Stanford studying international agricultural economics.

Naylor received her PhD from Stanford’s Food Research Institute in 1989, and is now a professor in the department of Environmental Earth System Science. Her interdisciplinary approach to teaching has resulted in popular courses such as the World Food Economy (which she co-teaches with Falcon,) and Human Society and Environmental Change. Naylor was appointed the William Wrigley Senior Fellowship in 2008 in recognition of her multidisciplinary, cutting-edge research and long-term commitment to combating global hunger and environmental degradation.

Falcon, the Helen Farnsworth Professor of Agricultural Policy, Emeritus, served as the director of Stanford’s Food Research Institute from 1972 to 1991. Falcon’s leadership role continued as FSI’s director from 1991 to 1998. Between 1998 and 2007, he co-directed the Center for Environmental Science and Policy out of which grew the Program on Food Security and the Environment.

FSE is now engaged in over 15 major projects with $11.5 million in grant and program funding under management. Productive food systems and their environmental consequences comprise the core of the Center’s research portfolio.

“Roz Naylor and Wally Falcon have worked tirelessly to promote the center’s mission and to secure the funding needed to support the center’s growth,” said FSI Director Coit D. Blacker. “It is gratifying to see FSE’s research and scholarly agendas receiving a resounding vote of confidence from the University as well as some of the world’s leading foundations, agencies and individual donors.” 

Over much of the world, the growing season of 2050 will probably be warmer than the hottest of recent years, with more variable rainfall. If we continue to grow the same crops in the same way, climate change will contribute to yield declines in many places. With potentially less food to feed more people, we have no choice but to adapt agriculture to the new conditions.

To some extent, adaptation can be done by moving crops to more favourable areas and by agronomic tweaks. But that will almost certainly not be enough. We will have to give crops a genetic helping hand, infusing them with new genes to allow them to better cope with new climates, and the new pests and diseases they will bring. Where are these genes going to come from?

Some of them could come from completely unrelated organisms, to be spliced into their new genomic homes using advanced biotechnologies. However, there is significant public resistance to that strategy, and it is still unclear how effective genetically modified crops are at coping with heat and drought. We cannot risk putting all our eggs in that basket.

Another source of genes for crop improvement are traditional heirloom varieties, often called landraces, which are still grown by subsistence farmers in many parts of the world, although they are fast disappearing. Large collections of their seeds have been made over the years, creating genebanks that are scoured by plant breeders searching for crop diversity, and which helped spur the Green Revolution in agriculture from the late 1960s.

But there’s a limit to the diversity found in domesticated species, imposed by domestication itself. Cultivated species usually contain a fraction of the genetic diversity found in their closest wild relatives — a legacy of the ‘domestication bottleneck’. Ancient farmers selected relatively few plants from the progenitors of modern crops, in a limited number of places. Although there has been continuous gene flow between crops and their wild relatives where they coexist, a lot of genetic diversity has been lost as agriculture has developed.

We know that the ‘lost’ genetic diversity includes genes for resistance to high temperatures and drought, and to pests and diseases, as well as taste and nutritional composition, and even yield. If there was ever a time to go back and reclaim this diversity, that time is now. In fact, it is already being used more than many people realize. For instance, there is probably no widely grown rice cultivar that does not have some genes obtained by breeders from its wild relatives. But we could be making much more effective, and systematic, use of the reservoir of diversity our Neolithic ancestors left behind.

To read the full commentary, click here.