Jennifer Burney and Krislert Samphantharak were awarded coveted fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, which allowed them to spend a month researching and writing in northern Italy
If you were looking to find Jennifer Burney and Krislert Samphantharak this summer, you would have had to trek to the hilly lakeside commune of Bellagio, Italy, located 36 miles north of Milan and just across the border from Switzerland.
But the professors, both of whom teach at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS), were not exactly on vacation. Rather, they individually received prestigious fellowships to research, write and exchange ideas with other thinkers at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center.
The foundation only invites around 100 people each year to the Bellagio Center. Burney and Samphantharak now join the ranks of its attendees, which have included a cadre of world-famous politicians, artists, scholars and Nobel laureates. To give an idea of its exclusivity, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Maya Angelou were both among the center’s alumni.
Burney and Samphantharak had four weeks in which they had their own living quarters and private workspaces, and meals were provided daily. (“It was like being in a boarding school,” Samphantharak said.) Each evening, they attended presentations by the other fellows.
The unifying principle behind the figures selected to the fellowship is each person’s potential to “define our present and shape our future,” according to the Rockefeller Foundation.
The surprising downsides of environmental conservation
Burney’s work fits the bill because of her groundbreaking research into the ways that climate change impacts how people raise, grow and harvest food. In recent years, mainstream society has begun focusing on how demand for animal products is tied to ever-increasing swathes of rainforest that are being mowed down to provide grazing land.
“It’s good news, right? In the international dialogue, there have started to be really serious commitments around land-use change and deforestation,” Burney said.
But she has found that those very same positive developments are a double-edged sword when it comes to producing enough food for people to survive. Burney spent her time as a fellow researching and writing an overview paper that reappraises the last decade or so of the relationship between climate change and food policy.
She described the practice of cutting down forests to make way for cropland as a “safety valve,” a stopgap solution that up until now has provided a glut of extra food to help in times of food shortages.
“But if we get really serious about these zero gross-deforestation commitments — that sort of opportunity closes, and that’s potentially really harmful from a food security perspective,” Burney said.
Meanwhile, new developments in climate science over the last several years have put into even sharper relief how much the planet’s weather systems are changing. Traditionally dry seasons are now getting wetter in some parts of the world — which could spell ruin for a whole harvest and drive up demand for food.
Reconciling these two realities is where international policy comes in. In her paper, Burney surveyed how food security programs have transitioned from in-kind food donations to fiscal support. But even that system is crumbling: the World Food Program — an agency of the United Nations that distributes food to underfed populations around the world — is buckling under demand. In light of these challenges, she lays out a framework for finding a way forward, ensuring that the Earth remains protected without making the people on it go hungry.
A blueprint for a brighter economic future
Krislert Samphantharak also spent his time at the Bellagio Center examining global developments over the last few decades. He is working on a book project about how Southeast Asian countries have developed their economies so successfully, in the process becoming what he described as “role models” for low- and middle-income countries that are looking to grow economically.
It is important to assess how the economies in this region got to where they are currently, and more importantly, to determine whether these economies are inclusive, resilient and sustainable. The short answer, he says, is no.
“So the next question to explore is, how can countries achieve inclusive, resilient, and sustainable prosperity, especially in the context of the changing global economic landscape?” Samphantharak said.
His forthcoming book aims to provide a blueprint for how these other countries can take the best features of Southeast Asia’s economic development while avoiding its pitfalls. Samphantharak had already made progress on several chapters of the book, but he said that the time he spent at the Bellagio Center was an opportunity to take a broader look at the work.
“I got to rethink the big picture, the structure of the book and the arguments in each chapter, starting from a blank canvas,” he said.
Perhaps it was meant to be: after all, GPS faculty members are renowned for moving past the status quo and introducing fresh ideas in their own work, and also in larger conversations about global affairs and public policy.
