Environment

FSI scholars approach their research on the environment from regulatory, economic and societal angles. The Center on Food Security and the Environment weighs the connection between climate change and agriculture; the impact of biofuel expansion on land and food supply; how to increase crop yields without expanding agricultural lands; and the trends in aquaculture. FSE’s research spans the globe – from the potential of smallholder irrigation to reduce hunger and improve development in sub-Saharan Africa to the devastation of drought on Iowa farms. David Lobell, a senior fellow at FSI and a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, has looked at the impacts of increasing wheat and corn crops in Africa, South Asia, Mexico and the United States; and has studied the effects of extreme heat on the world’s staple crops.

African Agricultural R&D and Productivity Growth in a Global Setting

Thursday, October 6, 2011 | 3:30 PM -Thursday, October 6, 2011 | 5:30 PM

Food and agricultural policy experts Prabhu Pingali and Philip Pardey will each speak on trends in productivity and investments in technology, survey of constraints to productivity, incentives and investment, and opportunities to raise productivity.

The Green Revolution - past successes, unfinished business, and the way forward

Pingali will review strategic components of the Green Revolution and its achievement and limits in terms of agricultural productivity improvement and broader impact at social, environmental and economic levels, including its impact on food and nutrition security. Lessons learned and the strategic insights these provide will be reviewed as the world is preparing a "redux" version of the Green Revolution with more integrative environmental and social impact combined with agricultural and economic development. Pingali will also point to core research & policy gaps that can enhance further spread and sustainable adoption of productivity enhancing technologies.

Prabhu Pingali is the Deputy Director of Agricultural Development at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Formerly, he served as Director of the Agricultural and Development Economics Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. Pingali was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences as a Foreign Associate in May 2007, and he was elected Fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association in 2006. Pingali was the President of the International Association of Agricultural Economists (IAAE) from 2003-06. Pingali has over twenty five years of experience in assessing the extent and impact of technical change in agriculture in developing countries, including Asia, Africa and Latin America.

African Agricultural R&D and Productiivity Growth in a Global Setting

Given the continuing importance of agriculture in most African economies, an in-depth understanding of the past and likely future productivity performance of African agriculture is key to assessing the overall economic growth and development prospects of the region. African agriculture operates in increasingly interconnected global commodity markets, so the relative productivity performance of African vis-à-vis rest-of-world agriculture is also relevant. This talk will present new evidence on African agricultural productivity performance and place that evidence in relation to the evolving pattern of agricultural productivity growth worldwide. Technological change is a principal driver of productivity growth, and new, updated evidence on the trends in R&D investments that give rise to these technological changes will also be presented and discussed. The productivity effects of R&D play out over comparatively long periods of time demanding a long-run look at these developments.

Philip Pardey is Professor of Science and Technology Policy in the Department of Applied Economics, and Director of the University of Minnesota's International Science and Technology Practice and Policy (InSTePP) center. His research deals with the finance and conduct of R&D globally, methods for assessing the economic impacts of research, and the economic and policy (especially intellectual property) aspects of genetic resources and the biosciences. He is a Fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association and a Distinguished Fellow of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society.

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Prabhu Pingali Deputy director, Agricultural Development Speaker Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Philip Pardey Professor of Science and Technology, Applied Economics Speaker University of Minnesota

Symposiums

Managing Food Price Volatility: Approaches at the Global, National and Household Levels

Thursday, May 26, 2011 | 4:00 PM -Thursday, May 26, 2011 | 6:00 PM

What does price instability have to do with food security? Price spikes hurt poor consumers, price collapses hurt farmers, and price risks reduce investment. Timmer's work suggests that food price instability also has a deeper and more insidious impact: it slows down economic growth and the structural transformation that is the pathway out of rural poverty. Food price instability really hurts the poor in both the short run and the long run.

"Food security is not a viable social objective unless it is also a profitable undertaking for input suppliers, farmers, and marketers of output. Consumers must then be able to afford to purchase this food, secure in the knowledge that it is safe and nutritious. Achieving food security within these constraints of a complex economic system is a challenge because both poor consumers and small farmers must be effective participants." -- Peter Timmer

Thom Jayne, Professor of International Development at Michigan State University, will join the conversation as a discussant following the main presentation.

Biography

C. Peter Timmer is a leading authority on agriculture and rural development who has published widely on these topics. He has served as a professor at Stanford, Cornell, three faculties at Harvard, and the University of California, San Diego, where he was also the dean of the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. A core advisor on the World Bank's World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development, Timmer also works with several Asian governments on domestic policy responses to instability in the global rice market. He is an advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on agricultural development issues.

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Peter Timmer

Center on Food Security and the Environment
Encina Hall East, E400
Stanford, CA 94305

ptimmer63@gmail.com

Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Development Studies, Emeritus, Harvard University

2720_image_PeterTimmerpg.jpg

C. Peter Timmer was a visiting professor at Stanford's Center on Food Security and the Environment in 2007. He is a leading authority on agriculture and rural development who has published widely on these topics. He has served as a professor at Stanford, Cornell, three faculties at Harvard, and the University of California, San Diego, where he was also the dean of the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. A core advisor on the World Bank's World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development, Timmer also works with several Asian governments on domestic policy responses to instability in the global rice market. In 1992, he received the Bintang Jasa Utama (Highest Merit Star) from the Republic of Indonesia for his contributions to food security. He is an advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on agricultural development issues.

Timmer's work focuses on three broad topics: the nature of "pro-poor growth" and its application in Indonesia and other countries in Asia; the supermarket revolution in developing countries and its impact on the poor (both producers and consumers); and the structural transformation in historical perspective as a framework for understanding the political economy of agricultural policy.

Peter Timmer Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Development Studies, Emeritus, at Harvard University Speaker

Thom Jayne Professor of International Development Commentator Michigan State University

Symposiums

The Stanford Food Summit

Wednesday, November 3, 2010 | 12:00 AM

An unprecedented gathering of Stanford experts on food-related issues from across all of the University’s seven schools provided a catalyst for generating solutions to some of the nation’s and the planet’s most challenging and important crises, including: the national health crisis, the climate crisis, outdated national food policies, the hidden toll of industrial food production and much more.

FSE Center Fellow David Lobell presented on Global Food Security. His presentation, along with the rest of the conference participants can be access here.

Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center

David Lobell

Energy and Environment Building
473 Via Ortega
Stanford CA 94305

(650) 721-6207

dlobell@stanford.edu

Professor, Earth System Science

Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment

Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR)

Affiliate, Precourt Institute of Energy

shg_ff1a1284.jpg PhD

David Lobell is the Benjamin M. Page Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Earth System Science and the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. He is also the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy and Research (SIEPR).

Lobell's research focuses on agriculture and food security, specifically on generating and using unique datasets to study rural areas throughout the world. His early research focused on climate change risks and adaptations in cropping systems, and he served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report as lead author for the food chapter and core writing team member for the Summary for Policymakers. More recent work has developed new techniques to measure progress on sustainable development goals and study the impacts of climate-smart practices in agriculture. His work has been recognized with various awards, including the Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union (2010), a Macarthur Fellowship (2013), the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences (2022) and election to the National Academy of Sciences (2023).

Prior to his Stanford appointment, Lobell was a Lawrence Post-doctoral Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He holds a PhD in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University and a Sc.B. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University.

Lobell Lab

A project to advance the science that guides investment in food security and crop productivity, and to effectively communicate this science to a broad audience.

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G-FEED: Global Food, Environment and Economic Dynamics

An interdisciplinary group working cooperatively to understand the relationship between society and the environment by examining regional and global scale phenomena using statistical analyses of real world data.

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David Lobell Speaker

Conferences

U.S. - Japan Dialogue to Promote Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Job Creation

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 | 1:30 PM -Wednesday, February 23, 2011 | 5:00 PM

Using research from the SPRIE-Project on Japanese Entrepreneurship (SPRIE-STAJE), representatives from the U.S. and Japanese governments met initially in Tokyo on May 27, 2010 to consider ways to foster an environment to promote new businesses and job creation. On November 13, 2010, the White House and the Prime Minister's Office formally launched the U.S.-Japan Dialogue to Promote Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Job Creation, elevating it to a policy-level dialogue in cooperation with SPRIE-STAJE. This dialogue aims to build on the conversation among Stanford's academic experts, prominent business people, and government officials about how to foster innovation through entrepreneurship. A roundtable discussion features the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship with leading Stanford academic experts, government officials, and business leaders. This will be followed by a panel discussion by experts from the U.S. and Japan on collaborative opportunities in pioneering smart grids for energy production, transmission, and distribution.

Featured speakers include:

John Roos, US Ambassador to Japan
Robert Hormats, Under Secretary for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State
William Miller, Co-Director, SPRIE, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford Univeristy
Michael Armacost, Shorenstein Distinguished Fellow, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University and Former Ambassador to Japan
Norihiko Ishiguro, Director General, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry
Larry W. Sonsini, Chairman, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
Daniel I. Okimoto, Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science & Director Emeritus, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University
Kathleen Eisenhardt, Professor, School of Engineering, Stanford University
Robert Eberhart, SPRIE Researcher, SPRIE, Shorenstsein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford Univeristy
Nobuyori Kodaira, Senior Managing Director, Toyota Motor Corporation,
Donald Wood, Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Richard Dasher, Director, US-Asia Technology Management Center