For 14 years, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar has been a tireless Stanford professor who has strengthened the fabric of university’s interdisciplinary nature. Joining the faculty at Stanford Law School in 2001, Cuéllar soon found a second home for himself at the Freeman Spogli for International Studies. He held various leadership roles throughout the institute for several years – including serving as co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation. He took the helm of FSI as the institute’s director in 2013, and oversaw a tremendous expansion of faculty, research activity and student engagement. 

An expert in administrative law, criminal law, international law, and executive power and legislation, Cuéllar is now taking on a new role. He leaves Stanford this month to serve as justice of the California Supreme Court and will be succeeded at FSI by Michael McFaul on Jan. 5.

 As the academic quarter comes to a close, Cuéllar took some time to discuss his achievements at FSI and the institute’s role on campus. And his 2014 Annual Letter and Report can be read here.

You’ve had an active 20 months as FSI’s director. But what do you feel are your major accomplishments? 

We started with a superb faculty and made it even stronger. We hired six new faculty members in areas ranging from health and drug policy to nuclear security to governance. We also strengthened our capacity to generate rigorous research on key global issues, including nuclear security, global poverty, cybersecurity, and health policy. Second, we developed our focus on teaching and education. Our new International Policy Implementation Lab brings faculty and students together to work on applied projects, like reducing air pollution in Bangladesh, and improving opportunities for rural schoolchildren in China.  We renewed FSI's focus on the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies, adding faculty and fellowships, and launched a new Stanford Global Student Fellows program to give Stanford students global experiences through research opportunities.   Third, we bolstered FSI's core infrastructure to support research and education, by improving the Institute's financial position and moving forward with plans to enhance the Encina complex that houses FSI.

Finally, we forged strong partnerships with critical allies across campus. The Graduate School of Business is our partner on a campus-wide Global Development and Poverty Initiative supporting new research to mitigate global poverty.  We've also worked with the Law School and the School of Engineering to help launch the new Stanford Cyber Initiative with $15 million in funding from the Hewlett Foundation. We are engaging more faculty with new health policy working groups launched with the School of Medicine and an international and comparative education venture with the Graduate School of Education. 

Those partnerships speak very strongly to the interdisciplinary nature of Stanford and FSI. How do these relationships reflect FSI's goals?

The genius of Stanford has been its investment in interdisciplinary institutions. FSI is one of the largest. We should be judged not only by what we do within our four walls, but by what activity we catalyze and support across campus. With the business school, we've launched the initiative to support research on global poverty across the university. This is a part of the SEED initiative of the business school and it is very complementary to our priorities on researching and understanding global poverty and how to alleviate. It's brought together researchers from the business school, from FSI, from the medical school, and from the economics department.  

Another example would be our health policy working groups with the School of Medicine. Here, we're leveraging FSI’s Center for Health Policy, which is a great joint venture and allows us to convene people who are interested in the implementation of healthcare reforms and compare the perspective and on why lifesaving interventions are not implemented in developing countries and how we can better manage biosecurity risks. These working groups are a forum for people to understand each other's research agendas, to collaborate on seeking funding and to engage students. 

I could tell a similar story about our Mexico Initiative.  We organize these groups so that they cut across generations of scholars so that they engage people who are experienced researchers but also new fellows, who are developing their own agenda for their careers. Sometimes it takes resources, sometimes it takes the engagement of people, but often what we've found at FSI is that by working together with some of our partners across the university, we have a more lasting impact.

Looking at a growing spectrum of global challenges, where would you like to see FSI increase its attention? 

FSI's faculty, students, staff, and space represent a unique resource to engage Stanford in taking on challenges like global hunger, infectious disease, forced migration, and weak institutions.  The  key breakthrough for FSI has been growing from its roots in international relations, geopolitics, and security to focusing on shared global challenges, of which four are at the core of our work: security, governance, international development, and  health. 

These issues cross borders. They are not the concern of any one country. 

Geopolitics remain important to the institute, and some critical and important work is going on at the Center for International Security and Cooperation to help us manage the threat of nuclear proliferation, for example. But even nuclear proliferation is an example of how the transnational issues cut across the international divide. Norms about law, the capacity of transnational criminal networks, smuggling rings, the use of information technology, cybersecurity threats – all of these factors can affect even a traditional geopolitical issue like nuclear proliferation. 

So I can see a research and education agenda focused on evolving transnational pressures that will affect humanity in years to come. How a child fares when she is growing up in Africa will depend at least as much on these shared global challenges involving hunger and poverty, health, security, the role of information technology and humanity as they will on traditional relations between governments, for instance. 

What are some concrete achievements that demonstrate how FSI has helped create an environment for policy decisions to be better understood and implemented?

We forged a productive collaboration with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees through a project on refugee settlements that convened architects, Stanford researchers, students and experienced humanitarian responders to improve the design of settlements that house refugees and are supposed to meet their human needs. That is now an ongoing effort at the UN Refugee Agency, which has also benefited from collaboration with us on data visualization and internship for Stanford students. 

Our faculty and fellows continue the Institute's longstanding research to improve security and educate policymakers. We sometimes play a role in Track II diplomacy on sensitive issues involving global security – including in South Asia and Northeast Asia.  Together with Hoover, We convened a first-ever cyber bootcamp to help legislative staff understand the Internet and its vulnerabilities. We have researchers who are in regular contact with policymakers working on understanding how governance failures can affect the world's ability to meet pressing health challenges, including infectious diseases, such as Ebola.

On issues of economic policy and development, our faculty convened a summit of Japanese prefectural officials work with the private sector to understand strategies to develop the Japanese economy.  

And we continued educating the next generation of leaders on global issues through the Draper Hills summer fellows program and our honors programs in security and in democracy and the rule of law. 

How do you see FSI’s role as one of Stanford’s independent laboratories?

It's important to recognize that FSI's growth comes at particularly interesting time in the history of higher education – where universities are under pressure, where the question of how best to advance human knowledge is a very hotly debated question, where universities are diverging from each other in some ways and where we all have to ask ourselves how best to be faithful to our mission but to innovate. And in that respect, FSI is a laboratory. It is an experimental venture that can help us to understand how a university like Stanford can organize itself to advance the mission of many units, that's the partnership point, but to do so in a somewhat different way with a deep engagement to practicality and to the current challenges facing the world without abandoning a similarly deep commitment to theory, empirical investigation, and rigorous scholarship.

What have you learned from your time at Stanford and as director of FSI that will inform and influence how you approach your role on the state’s highest court?

Universities play an essential role in human wellbeing because they help us advance knowledge and prepare leaders for a difficult world. To do this, universities need to be islands of integrity, they need to be engaged enough with the outside world to understand it but removed enough from it to keep to the special rules that are necessary to advance the university's mission. 

Some of these challenges are also reflected in the role of courts. They also need to be islands of integrity in a tumultuous world, and they require fidelity to high standards to protect the rights of the public and to implement laws fairly and equally.  

This takes constant vigilance, commitment to principle, and a practical understanding of how the world works. It takes a combination of humility and determination. It requires listening carefully, it requires being decisive and it requires understanding that when it's part of a journey that allows for discovery but also requires deep understanding of the past.

China’s commitment to agricultural development over the last thirty years has dramatically transformed the country’s economy. Rural income per capita has risen an astounding 20 times after 30 prior years of stagnation. Its poverty rate (US$1.25/day) has dropped from 40 percent to less than five, and 350 million rural people between the ages of 18-65 are now working in the industrial or service sector, enjoying rising wages and new economic opportunities.

This rapid transformation is largely the result of three key agricultural policy decisions: putting land in the hands of farmers, market deregulation, and major public investment in the agricultural sector. Although China must now contend with extreme inequality, high levels of pollution, and an aging farming sector there are still lessons to draw from China’s experience that could hasten the transformation of other developing countries.

China expert and agricultural economist Scott Rozelle broke these lessons down at FSE’s fourteenth Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series last week, opening with an underlying theme of the series.

“Growth and development starts with agriculture,” said Rozelle. “Agriculture provides the basis for sound, sustained economic growth needed to build housing, invest in education for kids, start self-employed enterprises, and finance moves off the farm.”

To prove this point he referenced China’s ‘lost decades’ (1950s-1970s) when 80 percent of the population lived in the rural sector and relied on communal, subsistence agriculture. Poor land rights, weak incentives, incomplete markets and inappropriate investments left the average rural farmer poorer at the end of 70s than they were in the 50s with almost no off-farm employment growth.

So what changed? Incentives, market deregulation and strategic investments by the state were key.

Creating the right incentives

In 1978 the Chinese government broke the communes down into small “family farms” such that every rural resident was allocated a small parcel of land. A family of five farmed an area the size of a football field. While they did not own nor could sell the land, they had the right to choose what crops and inputs they used and the right to the income generated from their land.

“Incentives are important, and can be enough in the short run,” said Rozelle. “Hard work led to money in the pockets of farmers and China was off.”

“Every two and half years China added another California in term of agriculture,” said Rozelle.

Between 1979 and 1985 productivity for wheat, maize, and rice went up 50 percent using the same amount of labor, land and inputs. Agriculture across the spectrum has grown at an astounding rate of 5 percent since 1988 (about four times the population growth rate). Livestock and fisheries have grown even faster – accounting for most of the output of the agricultural sector by 2005.

Income growth from farming enabled family members to begin to seek work off the farm. Between 1980 and 2011, off-farm work increased 71 percent with more than 90 percent of households reporting that at least one family member worked off the farm.

Increasing efficiency through liberalization and investment

Another key policy decision was China’s commitment to market liberalization and investment in public goods.

“Markets can be an effective, pro-poor tool of development,” said Rozelle. “A remarkable partnership is formed when you let farmers do production and government do infrastructure…let markets guide decisions.”

The government dismantled state-owned grain trading companies and deregulated trading rules. Prices were set once a week the same day across China to better integrate markets, and eventually prices for major crops closely mirrored those of world prices. Villages began specializing in crops and livestock and incomes of the poor increased. By not providing government input subsidies (e.g, pesticides, fertilizers), traders were incentivized to participate in the market.

“Giving land to farmers and letting the private sector emerge is an easy thing for governments, even without a lot of money, to do,” said Rozelle.

The government provided more indirect market support by publicly investing in better roads, communications, and surface water irrigation. Groundwater was left to the private sector. There were no water or pumping fees nor subsidies for electricity, keeping it completely deregulated. As a result, 50 percent of cultivated land in China is irrigated, compared to 10 percent in the US and only four percent in sub-Saharan Africa.

Finally, China has invested heavily in agricultural research and development (R&D). One percent of China’s agricultural GDP is now invested in agricultural R&D while US investment has fallen over time. US$2 billion alone goes to investments in Chinese biotechnology.

Despite major investment, China only has one major success story to show for so far. The introduction of Bt cotton led to a significant drop in pesticide use (with important health benefits for farmers), and drop in labor and seed price; resulting in a huge 30 percent increase in net income.

“GM technology benefits exist but big policy decisions still need to be made in the face of much resistance both in China and elsewhere in the world on its application,” said Rozelle.

Status of China’s economy

China has largely solved the country’s macro-nutrient food security problem at the household level (>3000 Kcal/day/person) and millions have been lifted out of poverty. Practically all 16-25 years old are now working off the farm.

“This is a real transformation, and one that could not have happened without a major investment in agriculture,” said Rozelle.

While China’s agricultural accomplishments have been major, Rozelle recognizes the system is far from perfect. For starters, there are serious food safety concerns due to lack of traceability. An astounding 98 percent of Beijing consumers think their food is tainted, said Rozelle.

Water is being pumped like crazy and farmers are aging. The younger generation is neither willing nor interested in following in their parents’ farming footsteps. To make up for a labor deficit farmers are applying huge amounts of fertilizer on their land with serious environmental consequences. As a result of changing demographics and an increasing demand for meat, fish, fruits and vegetables, China is likely to be a net importer of food in the long run.

China also faces major urban and rural inequality issues. Even though wages have risen, inequality has not fallen, largely a result of China’s decision not to privatize rural land.

“Rural people have no assets on which to build wealth while urban people were given assets in the form of housing,” said Rozelle. “Housing prices in major cities in China now rival those in the Bay Area!”

The Chinese government fears losing control of the land, but this comes at a price of less individual incentive to invest and inability to build larger farmers. As agricultural growth slows, Rozelle worries high levels of inequality could lead to instability.

Adding fuel to the fire, investment in rural health, nutrition, and education remains far from sufficient. Only 40 percent of the rural poor go to high school resulting in 200 million people who can barely read or write.

“What’s going to happen in 20 years when low skill manufacturing jobs move to other countries?” asked Rozelle. “The rural, uneducated poor are going to become unemployable.”

China’s record leaves room for improvement, but presents a strong case for supporting smallholder agriculture. For those countries emerging out of their own lost decades, smallholder agriculture should remain a primary focus of investment and development.