June 17th, 2008

FSE receives $3 million from Cargill to support visiting fellows, program activities

FSE is very happy to announce a five-year, $3 million donation from Cargill in support of a visiting fellows program and other program activities. "Cargill's investment will provide critical seed-funding for the innovative solution-based research and teaching going on at FSE," said Rosamond Naylor, FSE director and William Wrigley Senior Fellow at Stanford. "It will jump-start a visiting fellows program that will bring to Stanford experts working in key FSE research areas from the United States and abroad, and will help establish an infrastructure to support our research team."

• » Cargill press release

May 30th, 2008

FSE featured in Stanford Report

The Program on Food Security and the Environment was featured in a short profile in the Stanford Report. Read more »

May 21st, 2008

Fuel, food at odds in global food crisis, say FSE directors Naylor and Falcon

Energy self-sufficiency at home can mean widespread starvation abroad, FSE director Roz Naylor and deputy director Wally Falcon write in a May 18 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed. Read more »

May 20th, 2008

Is it Africa's turn? FSI scholars look at progress in the world's poorest region

By the turn of this century, sub-Saharan Africa had experienced 25 years of economic and political disaster. In the May/June 2008 issue of Boston Review, economist Edward Miguel tracks comparably hopeful economic trends throughout sub-Saharan Africa and suggests that we may be seeing a turnaround. Nine experts, including Rosamond Naylor and Jeremy Weinstein, gauge Miguel's optimism.
Read more »

April 25th, 2008

More recent coverage of global food crisis

In addition to important recent contributions to public understanding of the global food crisis by researchers at FSE, the issue is increasingly being picked up in the popular press. Read more »

April 24th, 2008

Ten million could die from rising food prices, says Timmer

FSE visiting professor Peter Timmer calculates that up to 10 million people in Asian countries could die prematurely from the recent run-up in global rice prices. In an interview with the Center on Global Development, he described the spike in the cost of rice as "the most serious problem facing the world food economy since 1973-74, when a million people in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh alone died prematurely as a result of a rice crisis." Read more »

April 23rd, 2008

Naylor discusses rising food prices on NPR, KQED Forum

Rosamond Naylor, director of the Program on Food Security and the Environment, discusses the global food crisis on NPR's Morning Edition and KQED Forum. She also was interviewed by ABC7, while program director Marshall Burke talked to NBC11.

• » NPR: Rising demand for meat takes toll environment
• » KQED Forum: Food prices and biofuels

April 1st, 2008

FSE researchers receive grant from Rockefeller Foundation to study climate threats to African agriculture

Researchers at FSE have received a 3-year, $350,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study the potential effects of climate change on agriculture and food security in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Rockefeller funded work will seek to assess climate threats to staple food crops at a country level, quantify the sources of uncertainty inherent in these assessments, and determine what implications shifts in crop climates have for agricultural adaptation and genetic resources preservation - with the end goal of helping prioritize investments in agricultural development and food security under a changing climate. Read more »

March 4th, 2008

Cohen's 10-week Google.org course on poverty and development now available on YouTube

Full video of the Google.org course on poverty and development that Program on Global Justice Director Joshua Cohen moderated from September to November 2007 is now available online at YouTube.com. The 10-week course, which focused on understanding poverty and development at the global, national, local, and personal levels, was the first of three courses on Google.org's main areas of philanthropic activity. Read more »

February 4th, 2008

FSE researchers' study on climate change and hunger published in Science

Crops of central importance to many of the worlds poor could be greatly harmed by climate change within the next two decades, according to a new study by researchers at Stanford University's Program on Food Security and the Environment (FSE). The results are scheduled for publication on February 1st in the journal Science. "Understanding where these climate threats will be greatest, for what crops, and on what time scales, will be central to our efforts at fighting hunger and poverty over the coming decades," said lead author David Lobell, senior research scholar at FSE. The article has received extensive coverage in the popular press. Read more »

January 16th, 2008

FSI and Woods Institute announce William Wrigley Senior Fellowship

Honoring the legacy of their husband and father, William Wrigley, Julie Ann Wrigley '71 and Alison Wrigley Rusack '80, along with Alison's husband, Geoffrey Claflin Rusack, have joined together to endow a new senior fellowship that will span both the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Woods Institute for the Environment. Read more »

January 9th, 2008

FSE and colleagues awarded $1.2 million for study of climate and biofuels production

Researchers at FSE and the Carnegie Institute at Stanford have been awarded $1.2 million by Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) for the study of the effect of biofuels expansion on climate. Read more »

December 3rd, 2007

Gates Foundation awards FSE and collaborators $3.8 million for the study of biofuels and food security

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded FSE and collaborators $3.8 million over three years for the study of "Biofuels and Food Security in the Developing World". The project is a collaboration between FSE, the International Food Policy Research Institute, the University of Nebraska, and the Center on Chinese Agricultural Policy. Read more »

December 2nd, 2007

Lobell joins FSE as Senior Research Scholar

FSE is very pleased to announce that David Lobell will be joining the program full time as a Senior Research Scholar, effective January 1 2008. Lobell is a world expert on the interactions between climate and agriculture, and his research attempts to use modern observational and computing capabilities (remote sensing, GIS, climate and crop models) to improve food security and reduce environmental impacts of food production. He is currently a post-doc at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and received his PhD in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford in 2005.

December 1st, 2007

FSE grad student Rodrigo Pizzaro wins Tech Museum Award

A non-governmental organization co-run by FSE graduate student Rodrigo Pizzaro has won a Tech Museum award in recognition of its "innovative work benefiting humanity". A non-governmental organization co-run by FSE graduate student Rodrigo Pizzaro has won a Tech Museum award in recognition of its "innovative work benefiting humanity". Read more »

November 7th, 2007

FSE welcomes Peter Timmer as Visiting Professor

FSE is excited to welcome Peter Timmer as FSE Visiting Professor. A global expert on agricultural policy and rural development, Timmer's current 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. Read more »

May 3rd, 2007

Climate change a threat to Indonesian agriculture, PNAS study says

A new study published May 8th in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) finds that Indonesian rice agriculture is greatly affected by short-run climate variability, and could be significantly harmed by long-run climate change. Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world, one of the world's largest producers and consumers of rice, and is characterized by a population of rural poor who depend on rice agriculture for their livelihood.
Read more »

March 20th, 2007

FSE scholars urge the need for both research and education as Berkeley's new Energy Biosciences Institute moves forward.

The institute's primary goal will be facilitating the production of biofuels on a scale large enough to result in a net drop of carbon emission linked to vehicles. "The magnitude of the scientific and environmental challenges involved in raising (crop) yields and at the same time protecting the environment is underestimated," cautions FSE scholar Kenneth Cassman. Chris Somerville adds that socioeconomic research should be a substantial portion of that effort as well. Read more »

March 19th, 2007

Global warming in the last 20 years has led to a decline in crop yields resultlng in an annual loss of $5 billion, says FSE scholars Lobell and Field

David Lobell and Chris Field released a report in the Environmental Research Letters journal on March 16, 2007 announcing that rising global temperatures are causing the loss of roughly 40 million tons of corn, wheat and barley production each year. Although yields in general are climbing due to technological improvements, higher temperatures have held yield potential down. "A key moving forward is how well cropping systems can adapt to a warmer world," Lobell said. "Investments in this area could potentially save billions of dollars and millions of lives."
Read more »

Biofuels research based on work of FSE scholar Chris Somerville helps win biofuels start-up $5 million in funding

Chris Somerville told CNET last month that the US has the spare plant matter to produce 130 billion gallons of ethanol. The US uses about 140 billion gallons of transportation fuel a year. Read more »

February 23rd, 2007

Global impact of livestock production focus of recent event

The harmful environmental effects of livestock production are becoming increasingly serious at all levels-local, regional, national and global-and urgently need to be addressed, according to researchers from Stanford, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other organizations. Read more »

June 21st, 2006

Fish farming does not create a net food gain for the world, says aquaculture specialist Rosamond Naylor

Rosamond Naylor claims that around two pounds of wild prey fish are required to create one pound of farmed fish.

• » Farming Finfish in Coastal Ecosystems and the Open Ocean: Assessing Options for Sustainability
• » New York Times Magazine article

March 20th, 2006

Aquaculture specialist Rosamond Naylor explores whether fish farms can sustainably meet the growing world demand

Can fish farms nourish the world without despoiling the ocean? Stanford experts work to solve a feeding quandary. Read more »

March 9th, 2006

Study confirms value of organic farming

CESP senior fellow Harold A. Mooney details the dangerous impacts nitrogen-rich chemical fertilizers can have on the atmosphere and important watersheds. He asserts "the use of organic versus chemical fertilizers can play a role in reducing these adverse effects." Read more »

March 8th, 2006

New Program on Food Security and the Environment Tackles Global Hunger and Environmental Destruction

This past autumn the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) in conjunction with the Woods Institute for the Environment launched a program on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) to address the deficit in academia and, on a larger scale, the global dialogue surrounding the critical issues of food security, poverty, and environmental degradation. Read more »