ABOUT |
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Dr. Walter Falcon is the Farnsworth professor of International Agricultural Policy at Stanford University (Emeritus), co-director at the Center for Environmental Science and Policy and former director of the Stanford Institute for International Studies.
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Specializing in agricultural policy in developing countries, Dr. Falcon provides a wide array of research experience as an analyst and consultant in international economic and environmental policy. His current research focuses on agricultural decision-making in Indonesia and Mexico, and on biotechnology.
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Dr. Falcon has been a trustee of Winrock International and chairman of the board of the International Rice Research Institute. He's been a member of the Presidential Commission on World Hunger, a Fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and chairman of the board of the International Corn and Wheat Improvement Center.
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Dr. Falcon was cited as the outstanding 1958 graduate of Iowa State University in 1989 and in 1992 he was awarded the prestigious Bintang Jasa Utama medal of merit by the government of Indonesia for twenty-five years of assistance with that country's development effort.
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He has authored six books on economic development, including coauthoring Food Policy Analysis, which won the 1984 Communication Award of the American Agricultural Economics Association (AAEA).
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| INTERVIEW |
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I grew up on a farm in Iowa, so I trace my food and agricultural roots to the farm land in Iowa. I would be a farmer now, except for one curious fact: I'm allergic to corn. That's probably not a good thing to be as a farmer in Iowa, so I went on to college and then got interested in development economics.
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I spent a decade working on the Indus basin development in Pakistan during the 60s and then, beginning in the 70s, continued on to work in many different countries but mostly in Indonesia.
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I did my Ph.D. work at Harvard in the early 1960s, which was the height of development economics at Harvard. There were eight or ten great development economists, several of whom went on to receive the Nobel Prize, who introduced the principle that if you want to do something about poverty in poor countries, you cannot forget about the agriculture sector. In this environment, it was an easy step for me to move from development economics to agricultural specialization within the development field.
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I have worked a lot in Mexico. Stanford has a large, interdisciplinary project there trying to understand how complicated irrigation systems work. If the geneticists have their fruit flies, we have interdisciplinary projects that bring together economists, hydrologists, agriculturists and ecologists to look at the economics, ecology and the environment in northern Mexico.
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"One can drop a thermometer in the central Pacific Ocean and nine months later we can predict with astonishing accuracy what the rice crop will be in Indonesia."
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I also work in Indonesia, which I have done for the past 30 years, and I am currently focused on developing forecasting models. As el Nino becomes better understood, and particularly as extreme weather events become more and more common, it is increasingly important to understand the impacts of el Ninos. Indonesia, which is right in the direct line of el Nino, is a really wonderful, if complicated case country to analyze.
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Colleagues and I are working on the interaction of climate, climate variability, how it plays through weather, and how farmers behave and react to it. It's truly amazing that one can drop a thermometer in the central Pacific Ocean and nine months later we can predict with astonishing accuracy what the rice crop will be in Indonesia.
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"Roughly a sixth of the world's population, by any standard, is poor and undernourished."
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In round numbers, a billion people, roughly a sixth of the world's population, by any standard, is poor and undernourished. That billion people, interestingly enough, are concentrated in about ten countries, and about two-thirds of them are in rural areas, not in cities. Although urban poverty and hunger is very ugly, most of the poor people in the world really live in the country.
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I come from a tradition where saving every soul is very important, but solving a village problem here and there isn't going to solve the hunger problem. It needs to be a much more concerted and broader effort.
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"Unless they can get jobs, income growth and productivity growth in agriculture, these countries are going to be poor and undernourished from here on."
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The problem of creating income for poor rural people is a much deeper issue than whether we can simply grow enough food for the world. I don't have much doubt that we can grow enough globally. The real issue is with the poor people in these particular niches in which they live and work. Unless they can get jobs, income growth and productivity growth in agriculture, these countries are going to be poor and undernourished from here on.
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And when one looks at the poverty and food security problems, one cannot be very pleased with how the involved parties are doing. The undeveloped countries aren't doing very well. The developed countries aren't giving the right kinds of aid, often complicating the lives of the poor with their subsidies programs. And the international agencies that ought to be doing more with agriculture and poverty alleviation simply aren't doing it.
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"Development economics, which was at its high point when I was in graduate school in the 60s, has certainly lost its bloom in the United States."
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I'm not even sure that the university community is doing all it should at the moment. Development economics has certainly lost its bloom in the United States. There are relatively few development economists these days. The concern with agriculture and where it fits in the development scheme of things has dropped out of the economic mainstream in particular, so as I say, there's lots of blame to share.
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I think we could do a lot more, and what we do, we could do more sensibly. An awful lot of things have to go right for poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to succeed. It is very hard to have any kind of development effort if the governments are totally ruthless or don't care about agriculture.
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I also think these countries and situations would benefit enormously from new kinds of technology integrated with local knowledge. I'm not one of those who believe technology is the magic bullet. It has to be a part of information and a development effort that makes sense.
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"In a perfect world, you probably wouldn't have very many people in these marginal areas to begin with. But we do."
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So it's hard just to think about agriculture. It's an economy-wide phenomenon that embraces technology, information and policy. And it's really hard to get all those things right because many of the poor live in marginal areas.
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In a perfect world, you probably wouldn't have very many people in these marginal areas to begin with. But we do. There are lots and lots of people who are without skills and resources, who are isolated and without transportation to get their products to market. These are some really big problems for which there are no easy solutions.
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"The green revolution was one of those great historical divides."
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The green revolution was one of those great historical divides. I was lucky enough to view it from the field in Pakistan, where I was working in the late 60's. It had fewer side effects than I thought it would. Its overall impact was more positive than I think we dared to expect. There were some negative effects as well, but I'm talking net now.
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It seems to me that if one thinks about the increase in agricultural output, it was terribly important. Without the yield-increasing technologies, there would have been a serious problem on land use and how people would have been fed. In terms of wheat and rice, hugely important crops in the developing world, the impact was enormous in terms of income, production and nutrition.
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"If I have a problem with the green revolution, it is that it was only a half-complete revolution."
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Were there some down sides? Yes. Until some of the varieties got all the resistance built into them, those varieties required more fertilizers, causing problems with nitrogen and other kinds of runoffs. Indeed, sometimes farmers use too much nitrogen as opposed to too little, although that is clearly not the case in Africa.
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There are different interpretations about the impact of the green revolution with respect to insecticides and pesticides. As the cultivars were improved, we were able to put more of the resistance into the seed, resulting in less spraying. In fact, there would have been more spraying if it were not for the green revolution.
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If I have a problem with the green revolution, it's that it was only a half-complete revolution. It really only affected wheat and rice, corn a little bit, though corn was late in coming. For large parts of Africa, the green revolution didn't proceed and didn't occur, and that is one of the problems with Africa at the moment.
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"Could that all happen today if there was a discovery of comparable magnitude?"
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The question I have in my mind is if someone had that innovation--the green revolution technology--today, would it be in the public sector? Would it be made freely available? Would it be free of charge to the poorer countries of the world? Would it be made available to the international centers, in this case the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico? Could that all happen today if there was a discovery of comparable magnitude? I'm not sure.
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"We're really going to have to make sure that technology is getting to the poor countries of the world."
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As more and more of the technology is locked up in the private sector and under intellectual property rights of some type, we're really going to have to make sure that technology is getting to the poor countries of the world. It's precisely those small countries, with low GNPs, lots of hunger, and with only limited private sector involvement, that need these technologies the most. It's not because the private sector is wicked or anything, it's just that these are the least interesting countries for them to go into.
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I am one who believes that technology has a huge role to play, but technology itself won't solve the major problems. There's got to be progress all the way along the line, and I worry about who is working on agriculture in these poorer countries. Agriculture seems to have lost its favor with the international institutions, in part because it's so difficult.
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"The only way I can see to make it a policy of lower consumer prices and higher farm prices is to make sure that farm productivity goes up."
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Trade issues are really important. But it's not a neat, linear picture.
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First of all, most poor people are net purchasers of food. They may live in the rural areas, but they buy more food than they sell. One of the tensions in all of the poor countries is the need for low prices for food to help poor people in the short run, versus the higher prices that you need for the long run to make it profitable for farmers to go on and create a dynamic agriculture. This is what I would say is the core question in food policy as one talks and gives advice in poor countries.
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Too many countries have forgotten about the higher prices for farmers and have concentrated on the lower prices internally through a set of policies. I say prices, but I should say, more correctly, profitability. The only way I can see to make it a policy of lower consumer prices and higher farm prices is to make sure that farm productivity goes up.
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That's where new technology comes in, and that's the thing that may make both things possible. But it is a terrible tension because hunger is here and now, technology is in the future a little bit. And at what point do you tip in favor of one or the other?
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"The evidence is clear: higher prices mean poorer fed kids."
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My colleagues have done some really interesting work in Indonesia. During the financial crisis in 1997 and 1998, they did nutrition surveys among children and found that when the price of food went up very substantially, the extent of stunting and of malnutrition clearly went up during those crisis periods.
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The evidence is clear: higher prices mean poorer fed kids. That's a terrible dilemma, even for the most responsible government in the world. Not a question of good government or bad government, it is just a really bad dilemma, and that's why I keep coming back to the productivity issue.
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"I think there is considerable merit in getting involved in trade, but then you want the rules of the game to be fair, and I'm not quite sure where we are on the fairness side at the moment."
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It doesn't make sense to me for poor countries to spend three dollars domestically for something they could buy for one dollar abroad. That's a kind of a simple minded example, but it goes to the heart of it. I think there is considerable merit in getting involved in trade, but then you want the rules of the game to be fair, and I'm not quite sure where we are on the fairness side at the moment.
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I'm not exactly sure where debt relief figures into all of this. It is a convenient rallying point, often the debt that we're talking about relieving is the result of pretty foolish loans to begin with and inept governments who requested them. Debt relief would provide help, provided that the underlying causes get fixed. But if the underlying causes--poor governments, wrong sets of priorities and so on--don't get fixed, you solve the problem for one or two years and then you're back in the soup again.
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"Why should Americans care?"
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Why should Americans care? It seems to me that part of the issue starts with understanding what the problem is. Too often the problem is seen as can the world produce enough grain? I don't think that's the fundamental concern with food security.
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I believe the question is how can we create jobs and incomes for a billion people who are poor, who don't want our charity, who want to be invested in so they can solve their own problems? That's an investment question, not a charity question. And it's going to take a lot of people doing sensible things.
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"The U.S. better be concerned with the growth, development, and the dignity of people in a number of these countries, unless we will regret it very directly in a world of instant communication, transport and so on."
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Another issue is self interest. It should be a concern of the U.S. that some of our actions really have quite awful effects on the poor countries and their agricultures.
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The despair that comes with poverty, with not having jobs for young people, often breeds difficulties, internally and externally, in a world of terrorism and weapons of all sorts. I think it is simple minded to think there's a link between terrorism and poverty, but I do think that's part of it. For the longer run, the U.S. better be concerned with the growth, development, and the dignity of people in a number of these countries, unless we will regret it very directly in a world of instant communication, transport and so on.
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"Americans believe that we are giving billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid; often polls show that people think that fifteen percent of the budget is going for that. It's far, far, far less than that."
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One more issue is, at least among Americans, not having a good understanding of how much it is that we are, or more correctly, aren't doing about hunger and poverty. Many Americans believe that we are giving billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid; often polls show that people think that fifteen percent of the budget is going for that. It's far, far, far less than that.
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This is an information and communication issue that needs to be solved, and it won't be easy. This misperception is the reason why we give so little aid, and why, in my view, too much of it is in food aid--which often disrupts agricultural development in recipient countries --and why we are not as big a player in the solution of these problems as we ought to be.
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As the world gets smaller and smaller in terms of communication and travel time, and more and more divided between the have's and have not's, it is in America's interest to be concerned about hunger. We need to worry about what's going on in the countryside, the marginal areas, and how to generate income and jobs there. That's the issue that we seem to have lost sight of.
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Walter Falcon can be reached at wpfalcon@stanford.edu.
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