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.

Abstract:

Political polarization has paralyzed the functioning of democracy in Thailand, Bangladesh, and Taiwan, where students have recently occupied the parliament building.  Civil liberties and political opposition are under intensified assault by an abusive prime minister in Turkey.  Indian democracy is increasingly diminished by brazen corruption and rent-seeking. Several African democracies have failed, and others are slipping.  The Arab Spring has largely imploded, and Egypt is in the grip of military authoritarian rule more repressive than anything the country has seen in decades.  After invading and swallowing a piece of Ukraine, Russia now poses a gathering threat to its democratic postcommunist neighbors.  For the eighth consecutive year, Freedom House finds that the number of countries declining in freedom have greatly exceeded the number improving.  And most of the advanced industrial democracies, including the United States, seem unable to address their long-term fiscal and other policy challenges.  Is there an emerging global crisis of democracy?  And if so, why?

Speaker Bio:

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he directs the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Diamond also serves as the Peter E. Haas Faculty Co-Director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as Senior Consultant (and previously was co-director) at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. During 2002-3, he served as a consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has also advised and lectured to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other governmental and nongovernmental agencies dealing with governance and development. His latest book, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (Times Books, 2008), explores the sources of global democratic progress and stress and the prospects for future democratic expansion.

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Abstract:

Decisions about “who gets what, when, and how” are perhaps the most important that any government must make. So it should not be remarkable that around the world, public officials responsible for public budgeting are facing demands—from their own citizenry, other government officials, economic actors, and increasingly from international sources—to make their public financial management more transparent and their decision-making around budgets more participatory. Surprisingly, rigorous analysis of the causes and consequences of fiscal openness is thin at best. Open Budgets seeks to fill this gap in existing knowledge by answering a set of key empirical questions: How and why do improvements in fiscal transparency and participation come about? How are they sustained over time? When and how do increased fiscal transparency and participation lead to improved government responsiveness and accountability? Theoretically, it seeks to examine the relationships between fiscal openness and democracy, development and the rule of law.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is the holder of the $12million endowed John Parke Young Chair in Global Political Economy at Occidental College, and also currently a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. He was previously Professor and Director of the Center for International Development at the University of Washington, Visiting Professor at Stanford's Institute of International Studies, Wyss Visiting Professor at the Harvard Business School, and Assistant and Associate Professor at Harvard's JFK School of Government.  Khagram has published widely including authoring the award winning book, "Dams and Development," co-editing the volumes "Restructuring World Politics," and, "The Transnational Studies Reader," as well as writing numerous peer reviewed articles including, "Inequality and Corruption," in the American Sociological Review and, "Future Architectures of Global Governance," in Global Governance. In the world of practice, Khagram was Deputy Secretary General of the World Commission on Dams (where he authored the widely acclaimed Final Report of the Commission), Dean of the Desmond Tutu Peace Center, and Author of the UN Secretary General's Report on the Impacts of the Global Economic Crisis in 2009.  Most recently, Dr. Khagram was the Architect/Coordinator of the mullti-stakeholder Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency and Founder/Head of Innovations for Scaling Impact. He has worked with global networks, multi-stakeholder initiatives, international agencies, governments, corporations, civil society organizations, professional organizations and universities all over the world. Dr. Khagram received his BA, MA, PhD Minor and PhD all from Stanford University.

Abstract:

It is almost too obvious to state, but access to public services and the nature of governance varies hugely within countries, regions and cities. Nevertheless, most work on the “quality of government”, rule of law, corruption, etc. focuses on between-country comparisons. After providing some evidence that within-country variation belies any notion of a national “quality of government”, I lay out a framework for explaining why outcomes vary so much across localities within countries. I explore the usefulness of the framework by providing evidence from three ongoing projects. The first relies on surveys designed to examine the role of slum-level social and political networks in conditioning access to basic public services in Udaipur, India. The second project relies on four post-civil war settings to understand why authorities target some localities with electrification projects but not others.  The third project involves a field experiment embedded in an aid program that compares alternative means of improving accountability in Ghana’s district governments. I will conclude with some reflections on the costs and benefits of working with donors on governance programming.

Speaker Bio: 

Erik Wibbels is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University. His research focuses on development, decentralized governance and other areas of political economy. He has also spent considerable time working with USAID's Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights and Governance in an effort to improve the quality of aid programs aimed at decentralized governance and service provision.

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.

SCID and SCP present a special seminar with Professor Xiaonian Xu

The Chinese economy has grown so fast and for so long. But the “miracle” has started fading in recent years.  Why?  Prof. Xu argues that the reform era can be divided into two fundamentally different phases.  Phase I, from 1978 to the mid-1990s, is characterized by market-oriented reforms, whereas Phase II, from the mid-1990s onward, is dominated by government-led investment and interventions. Though China’s growth performance looks identical in numbers over the two phases, the source of growth has changed from efficiency gains to increased use of resources. Phase II growth is thus unsustainable, and worse, it has brought about structural distortions that severely undermine the economy’s growth potential. To maintain growth even at a moderate level, China needs to go beyond what the leadership has promised and planned.

Dr. Xiaonian Xu is Professor of Economics and Finance at CEIBS. He worked for China International Capital Corporation Limited (CICC) since 1999 as Managing Director and Head of Research. The research team under Dr. Xu was ranked No. 1 in 2002 among domestic brokerage firms by Chinese institutional investors. And Dr. Xu himself was voted in the same survey as the best in economics research. Prior to CICC, Dr. Xu was Senior Economist with Merrill Lynch Asia Pacific based in Hong Kong from 1997 to 1998. He worked as a consultant of the World Bank in Washington DC in 1996. Dr. Xu was appointed Assistant Professor of Amherst College, Massachusetts, from 1991 to 1995, teaching Economics and Financial Markets. He was employed by the State Development Research Center of China as a research fellow from 1981 to 1985.
 
Dr. Xu obtained Ph.D. in Economics, University of California, Davis, in 1991, and MA in Industrial Economics in 1981 from People's University of China . He received Sun Yefang Economics Prize in 1996, the highest Chinese award in the field, for his research on China 's capital markets. His research interests include: Macroeconomics, Finance, Financial Institutions and Financial Markets, Transitional Economies, and China 's Economic Reform. Dr. Xu is the recipient of the 2005 and 2006 CEIBS Teaching Excellence Award. Dr. Xu received the prestigious CEIBS Medal for Teaching Excellence in 2010.