The United States belongs to various organizations and networks that encompass countries on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. The East Asia Summit (EAS) is not among them. Should the US try to join? This paper answers that question with a qualified yes: Despite formidable difficulties affecting President Obama’s schedule of foreign travel, his administration should try to “ease” the US into the Summit, initially as a guest of the host country. Eventually, pending a review of the EAS’s prior performance and future prospects, the administration may wish to upgrade that status to membership. The paper uses this case to illustrate larger themes, discusses the relevance of frameworks other than the EAS, and recommends, between radical innovation and benign indifference, a policy of creative adaptation to regionalism in East Asia.
Note: In July 2010 the Obama administration announced that it would, in effect, ease into an affiliation with the EAS. The initiative would include Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's attendance at the Summit in Hanoi in October 2010 and could include a trip by President Obama to the 2011 Summit in Indonesia.
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S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies Working Paper #193
The "Carbon Markets: Developing Countries & the Next Clean Development Mechanism" panel will be held from 3:25PM to 4:45PM
PESD researcher Richard K. Morse to speak at the 2010 MIIS International Trade and Investment Conference: Opportunities and Strategies in Emerging Economies on the "Carbon Markets: Developing Countries & the Next Clean Development Mechanism" panel.
The Monterey Institute of International Studies (an affiliate of Middlebury College) will be hosting this all day conference. This event is being held with the purpose of bringing together stakeholders in the fields of trade policy, business, and human development to enhance knowledge of and create constructive dialogue around the global trends shaping international trade policy, business innovation, and social ventures in emerging economies.
Monterey Institute of International Studies
Irvine Auditorium
499 Pierce Street
Monterey, CA 93940
Richard K. Morse
Panelist
Neal Dikeman
Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board for Carbonflow
Panelist
Barbara Haya
PhD Candidate at the UC Berkeley Renewable & Appropriate Energy Laboratory
Panelist
The impact of global warming on food prices and hunger could be large over the next 20 years, according to a new Stanford University study. Researchers say that higher temperatures could significantly reduce yields of wheat, rice and maize - dietary staples for tens of millions of poor people who subsist on less than $1 a day. The resulting crop shortages would likely cause food prices to rise and drive many into poverty.
But even as some people are hurt, others would be helped out of poverty, says Stanford agricultural scientist David Lobell.
Lobell discussed the results of his research on Feb 19 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego.
"Poverty impacts depend not only on food prices but also on the earnings of the poor," said Lobell, a center fellow at Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment (FSE). "Most projections assume that if prices go up, the amount of poverty in the world also will go up, because poor people spend a lot of their money on food. But poor people are pretty diverse. There are those who farm their own land and would actually benefit from higher crop prices, and there are rural wage laborers and people that live in cities who definiztely will be hurt."
Lobell and his colleagues recently conducted the first in-depth study showing how different climate scenarios could affect incomes of farmers and laborers in developing countries.
Household incomes
In the study, Lobell, former FSE researcher Marshall Burke and Purdue University agricultural economist Thomas Hertel focused on 15 developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Hertel has developed a global trade model that closely tracks the consumption and production of rice, wheat and maize on a country-by-country basis. The model was used to project the effects of climate change on agriculture within 20 years and the resulting impact on prices and poverty.
Using a range of global warming forecasts, the researchers were able to project three different crop-yield scenarios by 2030:
"Low-yield" - crop production is toward the low end of expectations.
"Most likely" - projected yields are consistent with expectations.
"High-yield" - production is higher than expected.
"One of the limitations of previous forecasts is that they don't consider the full range of uncertainties - that is, the chance that things could be better or worse than we expect," Lobell said. "We provided Tom those three scenarios of what climate change could mean for agricultural productivity. Then he used the trade model to project how each scenario would affect prices and poverty over the next 20 years.
"The impacts we're talking about are mainly driven by warmer temperatures, which dry up the soil, speed up crop development and shut down biological processes, like photosynthesis, that plants rely on," he added. "Plants in general don't like it hotter, and in many climate forecasts, the temperatures projected for 2030 would be outside the range that crops prefer."
Results
The study revealed a surprising mix of winners and losers depending on the projected global temperature. The "most likely" scenario projected by the International Panel on Climate Change is that global temperatures will rise 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) by 2030. In that scenario, the trade model projected relatively little change in crop yields, food prices and poverty rates
But under the "low-yield" scenario, in which temperatures increase by 2.7 F (1.5 C), the model projects a 10 to 20 percent drop in agricultural productivity, which results in a 10 to 60 percent rise in the price of rice, wheat and maize. Because of these higher prices, the overall poverty rate in the 15 countries surveyed was expected to rise by 3 percent.
However, an analysis of individual countries revealed a far more complicated picture. In 11 of the 15 countries, poor people who owned their own land and raised their own crops actually benefited from higher food prices, according to the model. In Thailand, for example, the poverty rate for people in the non-agricultural sector was projected to rise 5 percent, while the rate for self-employed farmers dropped more than 30 percent - in part because, as food supplies dwindled, the global demand for higher-priced crops increased.
"If prices go up and you're tied to international markets, you could be lifted out of poverty quite considerably," Lobell explained. "But there are a lot of countries, like Bangladesh, where poor people are either in urban areas or in rural areas but don't own their own land. Countries like that could be hurt quite a lot. Then there are semi-arid countries - like Zambia, Mozambique and Malawi - where even if prices go up and people own land, productivity will go down so much that it can't make up for those price increases. In the 'low-yield' scenario, those countries would see higher poverty rates across all sectors."
Under the "high-yield" scenario, in which global temperatures rise just 0.9 F (0.5 C), crop productivity increased. The resulting food surplus led to a 16 percent drop in prices, which could be detrimental to farm owners. In Thailand, the poverty rate among self-employed farmers was projected to rise 60 percent, while those in the non-agriculture sector saw a slight drop in poverty. In Zambia, Mozambique, Malawi and Uganda, poverty in the non-farming sector was projected to decline as much as 5 percent.
Risk management
Lobell said that, although the likelihood of the "low-yield" or "high-yield" scenario occurring is only 5 percent, it is important for policymakers to consider the full range of possibilities if they want to help countries adapt to climate change and ultimately prevent an increase in poverty and hunger.
"It's like any sort of risk management or insurance program," he said. "You have to have some idea of the probability of events that have a big consequence. It's also important to keep in mind that any change, no matter how extreme, will benefit some households and hurt others."
The Program on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford is an interdisciplinary research and teaching program that generates policy solutions to the persistent problems of global hunger and environmental damage from agricultural practices worldwide. The program is jointly run by Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Long before the current global economic crisis, Japan adopted important reforms in commerce, corporate governance, finance, and education. These changes stemming from the 1990s "lost decade" have created new opportunities for entrepreneurial activity. Following a presentation of new cross-sectional data on 60,000 operating Japanese corporations started in the last decade, the panel will discuss the state of Japanese entrepreneurship. What companies are forming? Who is behind them? What are their potential fates?
This discussion is part of continuing research being undertaken by SPRIE's Stanford Project on Japanese Entrepreneurship and is presented in conjunction with Entrepreneurship Week at Stanford.
About the Panelists
Richard Dasher
Richard Dasher is Director of the US-Asia Technology Management Center at Stanford University and has been with the Center since 1993. Dr. Dasher maintains an active business consulting practice on international strategy and planning, technology trend and opportunity analysis, and Japan market entry and performance improvement.
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Robert Eberhart is the SPRIE Researcher at the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and leads the SPRIE-Stanford Project on Japanese Entrepreneurship. He researches comparative corporate governance of growth companies with emphasis on Japan and the role of institutions in fostering entrepreneurship. Previously, he founded and served as CEO of WineInStyle, a VC-funded start-up Japanese company.
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Shigeo Kagami is Professor and General Manager of Science Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development (SEED) at the University of Tokyo. His responsibilities there include entrepreneurship education, management of incubation facilities for university start-ups, and relationship management with The University of Tokyo Edge Capital.
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Kenji E. Kushida is a Graduate Researcher at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE) and a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at University of California Berkeley.
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William Miller is Co-Director of the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Serving as Vice President and Provost of Stanford and President and CEO of SRI International are just two of the many highlights of Dr. Miller's illustrious career in business and academia. He currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Sentius Corporation and is a Founder and Chairman of Nanostellar, Inc.
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Allen Miner is a founder and General Partner of SunBridge Partners and founder and Director of SunBridge Corporation. After joining Oracle Corporation in 1986 he founded and helped lead Oracle Japan, and later served as Oracle's Vice President in charge of Linux/Open Source. He founded SunBridge Corporation in 1999 with the aim of creating a dynamic, collaborative environment in which Japanese information technology startups develop at a globally competitive pace.
From 2004, Dr. Dasher became the first non-Japanese person ever asked to join the governance of a Japanese national university, serving a term as a Board Director (理事) of Tohoku University . He continued as a member of the Management Council (経営協議会) until March 2010, and he now serves as Senior Advisor to the President (総長顧問) of Tohoku University. Dr. Dasher has been a member of the high-profile Program Committee of the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI) of the Japanese Ministry of Education (MEXT) since 2007. He has served on the Multidisciplinary Assessment Committee of the C$500 million Canada Foundation for Innovation Leading Edge Fund in 2007 and again in 2010, and as a member of the Phase I and Phase II Review Panels of the C$200 million Canada Excellence Research Chairs Program in 2008 and again in 2010. He was a distinguished reviewer of the Hong Kong S.A.R. study on innovation in 2008–09, and since 2007 he has been a member of the Foresight Panel of the German Ministry of Education and Research. From 2001–03, Dr. Dasher was on the International Planning Committee advising the Japanese Minister of State for Science and Technology Policy in regard to the formation of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.
As allowed by Stanford policy, Dr. Dasher maintains an active management consulting practice, through which he is an advisor to start-up companies and large firms in the U.S., Japan, and China. He has been a board director of Tokyo-based ZyCube Inc. since 2006, and he is founder and chairman of Pearl Executive Shuttle in Valdosta, Georgia, U.S.A. In the non-profit sector, he is a Board Director of the Japan Society of Northern California and the Keizai Society U.S. – Japan Business Forum, and he is an advisor to organizations such as the Chinese Information and Networking Association, the Silicon Valley – China Wireless Technology Association, and the International Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Science and Technology (iFEST). In 2010 he served as a consultant to The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) in regard to their establishment of a worldwide remote mentoring program for entrepreneurs. Dr. Dasher frequently gives speeches and seminars throughout Japan and Asia, as well as in the U.S. Recent appearances include the Nikkei Shimbun Business Innovation Forum, the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, speaking tours of Japan co-sponsored by METI and the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, and guest lectures at Chubu University, Kochi University of Technology, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, and the University of Tokyo.
From 1990–93, Dr. Dasher was a board director of two privately-held Japanese companies in Tokyo, at which he developed new business in international licensing of media rights packages and other intellectual properties. From 1986–90, he was Director of the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute advanced field schools in Japan and Korea, which provide full-time language and area training to U.S. and select Commonwealth country diplomats assigned to those countries. He received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Linguistics from Stanford University and, along with Prof. Elizabeth Closs Traugott, he is co-author of the often-cited book Regularity in Semantic Change (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He received the Bachelor of Music degree in clarinet and orchestra conducting from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he served on the faculty from 1978-85.
Richard Dasher
Panelist
Robert Eberhart
Panelist
Shigeo Kagami
Professor and General Manager
Panelist
Science Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development, University of Tokyo
Kenji Kushida
BRIE Fellow
Panelist
UC Berkeley
William F. Miller
Panelist
Allen Miner
Founder and General Partner
Panelist
Sunbridge Partners
Conferences
Stanford Project on Japanese Entrepreneurship (STAJE)
Carolina for Kibera (CFK) inspires and nurtures youth leaders in the slum of Kibera, Kenya through a unique model of participatory development. CFK recognizes the youth of Kibera as resilient, wise, innovative, and eager to lift their community above the poverty and violence that plagues it. CFK's long-term initiatives provide youth opportunities to learn and serve while addressing a wide range of community needs including healthcare, education, waste recycling and reduction, HIV/AIDS testing and counseling, and girls' empowerment. CFK's model of participatory to fight abject poverty, and prevent ethnic, gender and religious violence has been internationally recognized, earning awards as a Time Magazine and Gates Foundation "Hero of Global Health" and the 2008 Oklahoma City National Memorial Foundation's Reflections of Hope Award. CFK is a major affiliated entity of UNC based at the Center for Global Initiatives.
Salim Mohamed Salim Mohamed co-founded and served as the Executive Director of Carolina for Kibera for eight years. At the age of 16, he was involved in the development of MYSA - the largest youth sports program in Africa based in the Mathare slum of Nairobi. Salim has helped launch community based sports and development programs in Ghana, Gambia, and Nigeria and presented at the International AIDS Conference. He serves as a director for Shoe 4 Africa, an advisor to Global Education Fund and a YES! facilitator. A TED Africa Fellow, he is currently pursuing a master's degree at the University of Manchester.
Rye Barcott While an undergraduate on an NROTC scholarship at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2001, Barcott founded CFK with the late nurse Tabitha Atieno Festo and community organizer Salim Mohamed. Barcott served five years in the Marine Corps before earning a combined MBA and MPA at Harvard as a Reynolds Social Entrepreneurship Fellow and a member of the Harvard Endowment's Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility. In 2006, he was named an ABC World News Person of the Year. A TED Fellow and member of the UNC Chancellor's Innovation Circle, Barcott is writing a book that juxtaposes community organizing and counter-insurgency (under contract, Bloomsbury Publishing).
Oksenberg Conference Room
Rye Barcott
Founder (l)
Speaker
Carolina for Kibera (CFK)
Salim Mohamed
Co-Founder (r)
Speaker
Carolina for Kibera (CFK)
While Americans' appetite for seafood continues to grow, most of us know little about where our fish comes from or how it was produced. In California, more than half of our seafood comes from aquaculture, often imported from fish farms in other countries. Just as most chickens, pigs and cows are raised in tightly confined, intensive operations, so too are many farm-raised fish.
But raising fish in tight quarters carries some serious risks. Disease and parasites can be transmitted from farmed to wild fish. Effluents, antibiotics and other chemicals can be discharged into surrounding waters. Nonnative farmed fish can escape into wild fish habitat. And a reliance on wild-caught fish in aquaculture feed can deplete food supplies for other marine life.
These environmental impacts have been evident in many other countries with intensive marine fish farming. In Chile, where industry expansion was prioritized over environmental protection, salmon aquaculture has collapsed, causing a major blow to what had been one of Chile's leading exports. Tens of thousands of people are now jobless in southern Chile, where the salmon farming industry once boomed.
If aquaculture is to play a responsible role in the future of seafood here at home, we must ensure that the "blue revolution" in ocean fish farming does not cause harm to the oceans and the marine life they support.
In December, Rep. Lois Capps (D-Santa Barbara) introduced in the House the National Sustainable Offshore Aquaculture Act, a bill that addresses the potential threats of poorly regulated fish farming in U.S. ocean waters. Her bill shares many of the features of a California state law, the Sustainable Oceans Act, which was written by state Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) and signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006. That legislation regulates fish farming in state waters, which extend three miles off the California coast. At present, all aquaculture operations in California and the U.S. are located just a few miles offshore.
If the U.S. and other states follow California's lead, we may be able to reward innovation and responsibility in aquaculture and at the same time prevent the kind of boom-and-bust development that happened in Chile. Unlike previous attempts to legislate fish farming at the national level, the Capps bill would ensure that U.S. aquaculture in federal waters, which extend from three to 200 miles offshore, establishes as a priority the protection of wild fish and functional ecosystems. It would ensure that industry expansion occurs only under the oversight of strong, performance-based environmental, socioeconomic and liability standards.
The bill also would preempt ecologically risky, piecemeal regulation of ocean fish farming in different regions of the U.S. Indeed, regulation efforts are already underway in many states, with no consistent standards to govern the industry's environmental or social performance. If these piecemeal regional initiatives move forward, it will get much more difficult to create a sustainable national policy for open-ocean aquaculture.
Previous federal bills introduced in 2005 and 2007 were fundamentally flawed -- and ultimately did not pass -- because they put the goal of aquaculture expansion far above that of environmental protection. Now, for the first time, a bill has been introduced that would demonstrably protect marine ecosystems, fishing communities and seafood consumers from the risks of poorly regulated open-ocean aquaculture.
The Obama administration is currently developing a national policy to guide the development of U.S. aquaculture. The administration would do well to embrace the vision articulated by Capps and Simitian for a science-based and precautionary approach to help ensure a responsible future for U.S. ocean fish farming.
Rosamond L. Naylor is director of the program on food security and the environment at Stanford University. George H. Leonard is director of the aquaculture program at the Ocean Conservancy in Santa Cruz.
Elizabeth Eagen introduced the Human Rights Data Initiative at the Open Society Institute - a project to support human rights organizations in using technology to further their goals.
The management of information is crucial to human rights work but the majority of organizations are at a very early stage of being able to utilize new technologies. For organizations tracking human rights violations, the stream of work is continuous and leaves little time for strategic thinking about the adoption of new tools.
When thinking about the role of technology, there has been a tendency for human rights organizations to focus on the way that they communicate their work more widely; for example, investing in a better website design. This neglects more fundamental issues around the management of the core databases and information flows that drive human rights work. Many of the current developments in the field of technology for development enable organizations to communicate issues in a powerful way. Visualizations using satellite data - for example to show the extent of damage resulting from conflict in Georgia - are an effective way of conveying a situation quickly. But they lack the details human rights organizations require: who was attacked and when; are the buildings civilian or military targets? There is really no substitute for the kind of human evidence required to build a convincing case that human rights violations have taken place. Often much of this case is paper based. This presents a real challenge of how to capture all of this history and make it manageable.
The Human Rights Data Initiative project is in the process of giving human rights organizations in the Open Society Institute network the opportunity to think about what kind of technology tools might contribute best to their work. This project requires gaining a better understanding of how the organization operates and what barriers might exist to utilizing technology. This might be something as basic as poor internet connection or as complex as an overall organizational culture. The goal is for human rights groups in the network to reach a position where they better understand their technology needs and how best to fill them.
Matt Halprin is a Partner leading Omidyar Network's Media and Stephen King is the Director of Investments and is based in London. They introduced us to the work of Omidyar Network which invests in market-based efforts to give people the technology tools they need to improve their lives.
The network was set up in 2004 by Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, and his wife Pam. It comprises both a venture capital fund and a grant-making foundation. The network has a strong focus on individual empowerment and is committed to market-based solutions, believing that business is one of the best mechanisms for achieving sustainable social impact. Omidyar looks to invest in projects that have potential to impact large numbers of people and that show signs of real innovation - for example, new business models or new markets.
So far $307 million has been committed, with $138 million going to for-profit investments and $169 million to non-profit grants. There are two broad areas of focus:
Access to capital: This encompasses projects around microfinance, entrepreneurship and property rights.
Media, markets and transparence: This encompasses projects around social media, marketplaces and government transparency. Omidyar are particularly interested in the role of journalism in ensuring accountability of governments.
Projects in the Unities States include:
The Sunlight Foundation - works to make information about Congress and Federal government more accessible and meaningful to citizens; created the first searchable site for all federal government contracts to monitor where money is going.
Global Integrity - uses quantitative and qualitative analysis to provide a scorecard tracking governance and corruption in different countries.
In the developing world, Omidyar looks to supports access to greater information and government transparency, which it views as key drivers of prosperity. The network is supporting global organizations, national partners in three African countries (Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya) and is establishing a pan-African mechanism for smaller grants. Current global projects include:
Ushahidi - an open source platform to report and share data in the aftermath of a crisis. Omidyar will be working to help Ushahidi to build traffic to the site and to tackle the challenge of verifying reports.
Infonet - a web portal that acts as an information hub for all national and devolved budgets in Kenya; currently used by NGOs, citizen groups and the media.
Mzalendo - a one stop shop for citizens to track the activities of parliamentarians in Kenya.
FrontlineSMS - a two way communication tool using laptops and mobile phones for organizations without internet access.
In the study, Lobell, former FSE researcher 
Richard Dasher
