 Good morning, everyone. I'm Professor Sean Sullivan. I teach in the National Security Affairs Department here at the Naval War College. And Ambassador McGann's thoughts about the Chatham House rules bring back a memory. This is my third year as a moderator for this conference. And in my first year, I would appreciate if you noticed the proficiency of my trajectory right now. But in the first year, I got a little nervous. And I confused Chatham House rules with, and I called them Marcus the Queensberry rules, which refer to boxing. I don't want to scare anybody if I fall into that. But whatever we do, whatever rules we play by Chatham House is number one. Marcus the Queensberry, not today. So today's panel is going to discuss and analyze elements of food security. And I'd like to welcome everybody, and welcome particularly our panel. Ms. Jennifer Gallegos is the Director of Coffee for Fair Trade USA. She's also the Vice President of the International Women's Coffee Alliance. Dr. Krista Jacobson is from the Bureau of Food Security at USAID. And Colonel Jody Prescott, Army Retired, is an adjunct professor from the University of Vermont and a senior fellow at the West Point Center for the Rule of Law. So what we'll do today is we'll have our presenters discuss and present for about 15 minutes. And at the end of each presentation, we'll follow up with about 20 minutes or so. We should have about that amount of time for comments, questions, and the interactions that make this conference so effective and so valuable. So what I'd like to do now is have Jennifer proceed. Thanks. Good morning. You may have noticed from my bio that I am not an advisor, a researcher, a writer, a professor. But their work makes my work possible. It makes it valued. It makes it understood. It makes it supported and funded. So I'm very grateful and humbled and honored to be here speaking with you. What I am is a woman in coffee. And I am dedicated and committed to making it the first 100% sustainable agriculture commodity in the world. What I hope is that those of you out there unfamiliar with the role of women and sustainability is that you recognize and walk away from here knowing that there is enough evidence and proof that women make valuable contributions all along the value chain. We have enough proof. They are key to sustaining everything. They are key to sustaining our economy, our health, the environment, our families, our harmony, and our future. They're definitely, definitely key to sustaining your favorite daily beverage. In both of my roles as the vice president of the International Women's Coffee Alliance and as the director of coffee at Fair Trade, I see firsthand the contributions that women make every day. I clearly understand the why, but I also know that not everyone is convinced. So I still need a lot of case studies out there to help convince the others. Coffee is very, very big business. If you had a cup of coffee this morning and you're still enjoying one, you should know that you're enjoying something that is more valuable than soy, wheat, gold, natural gas. It is the second most valuable traded commodity in the world. Coffee is an addiction. Over 85% of Americans drink 2.7 cups a day. And we're not even the most consuming country in the world. Finland and Netherlands are. And your cup is only one of 600 billion that will be drank this year. Through a recent study by the National Coffee Association and Technomic, it was estimated that coffee's total economic impact is $225 billion. For comparison, the beer industry is $253 billion. Bottled water is $156 billion. The value of coffee at retail is $72 billion. If you look at total food and beverage sales and if you look at this excluding alcohol for every dollar that a consumer spends, 5.3 of that is on coffee. But coffee is facing many challenges. In order for you to understand them, you need to know a little bit about how it's grown. Coffee is grown in four primary regions, Central America, South America, Africa, and Asia. The biggest places are Brazil, Colombia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Ethiopia. It is grown on a coffee plant, has a flower, and a really beautiful cherry. And it is grown under shade trees. The highest quality is grown at high elevations, anywhere between 3,000 and 6,000 feet. Although climate change is pushing farmers higher and higher up the mountain, in places like Bolivia, you can now see it grown at 7,500 feet. The average coffee produces two pounds of coffee. The average tree produces two pounds of coffee. So if you shop at a club store and you buy the two pound bags, that takes 65 to 70 trees. 70% of it is grown by small holders, which means they are on less than 10 hectares. And that's grown in developing countries, countries that are already facing food insecurity, poverty, disease, climate change, loss of land, migration, and many times are already in conflict with political unrest or drug violence. In order to bring you the best cup of coffee, it's hand-picked and hand-sorted, and it must be done at exactly the right time. The cherry has to be red, not yellow, not green. By the time it hits your cup, it's gone through seven transformations, and it's gone through 30 different hands. As you can see here, though, the price paid to the farmers, which is the last line, the green line, has not kept up with the price that's at the top, the gray line that you pay for your latte or your cappuccino. That gray line at the top is the line that's paid, typically when it makes its last transformation. The bottom line is what's paid to the farmer. That stayed static for 30 years. What business do you know? The price has stayed consistent for 30 years. The average 200-day price for the sea market is $1.23. Coffee is a luxury egg commodity. It has zero nutritional value, but it is a market-demanded cash crop, and our under-evaluation of it poses huge threats to food security and political instability, as well as into a household and community-level inequities. Sadly, it's not a winning value proposition any longer for coffee farmers. It is easier for them to sell their real estate or sell their land to real estate development or to illicit activities. This all-while demand for coffee is increasing. Millennials love their coffee. And also in producing countries, they've started to recognize that their coffee tastes pretty good, and they like it too. As the income for farmers is not keeping up with the cost of increases in fuel, labor, inputs, fertilizer, transportation, and equipment, and if they haven't diversified their crops, then we're seeing huge spikes in hunger and malnutrition. Additionally, as the prices are not keeping up with the cost of production, we're now seeing higher incidences of child and forced labor. The existing studies that examined food and insecurity are right now predominantly focused in Latin America, and the most recent one was in Mexico, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and we found that 63% of coffee households suffered insecurity during the year, 63% of them. Food insecurity is so prevalent in Latin America that they've titled it Los Mesos Flacos. Los Mesos Flacos means the thin months. We know it's even worse in Asia and Africa, where poverty is more extreme and the social safety nets are less available. The negative impact of malnutrition and hunger does not just affect the individual, it affects the total community. It affects the community because it translates into loss of education, lowered work productivity, and higher health costs, which means that in coffee-growing communities, the farmers, the pickers, and their children do not reach their full potential, which essentially keeps families in generational poverty. Of the world's estimated 1 billion poor, Krista and I know that these numbers are not always accurate, not great numbers in agriculture commodity. 25 million are in coffee, 70% of those are women. Women face additional challenges with gender inequality that are prevalent throughout the world's coffee-growing regions and are often unable to get economic, social, or any political power. Unfortunately, women rarely, rarely occupy any leadership positions in policy-making organizations like the ministries of agriculture or their local or producer organizations, and these are the organizations that are tasked with closing the gender gap. If you have no women representation, how can you close that gender gap? My organization, IWCA, facilitates the empowerment of women for exactly this reason. We give them a lifeline, we give them hope, we give them education, we give them training, we give them a network to reach out to around the globe, all in an effort to give them self-esteem so that they can step up into these leadership roles to start closing this gender gap. The IWCA acts as advocates because we support and we believe wholeheartedly that the way that we're going to meet the ambitious sustainable development goals adopted by the UN to end poverty in all forms everywhere while leaving no one behind is going to come through women. We also firmly believe that the SGG number five to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls will have the most impact and influence on all people living in poverty, especially in agriculture. I have intentionally left these slides gray because most of the women are invisible and have no voice. Women work double hours in coffee. Men work an average of eight while women work around 15. Women undertake, as you heard yesterday in Dr. Valerie Hudson's speech, they undertake about 70% of the field work but typically only own around 15% of the land, many times less, and are involved in less than 10% of the trading. Within a household, the decision-making power is always given to the person who has control of the income and ownership of the assets. Therefore, the men take control of the decisions for the house. What does this mean? This means the woman has no control over her future or the future of her children. Evidence shows that if women have the same access to men such as resources to land, finance, training, seed varieties, new technology, microfinance and better training, yields would increase by as much as 30% per household and countries could see an increase of 4% in agriculture output. In other words, when women are meaningfully involved in agriculture development, not only do farms become more productive but overall family improves and communities thrive. Many programs in place to address food security fail because they were built without the women's involvement. Again, women are invisible. Typically when people go into these places to teach about food security, they're teaching the men. The men doesn't do the cooking, he doesn't take care of the crops, nor does he know what his family eats. Empowering women with knowledge and giving them access transforms them from voiceless laborers into leaders of sustainable and profitable businesses. The best part about including the women is they share their knowledge. They go back and they teach communities. Women care about the world. They care about things around them. They think about the future. I had hundreds of stories to share today, but I picked two. You can keep it here. This one is from a project in Wila, Colombia. It's being supported by two groups, Expo Cafe and Solidaridad. It's a woman's initiative that is specifically focused on family prosperity, generational renewal and food security. I spoke to the project leader just recently and she told me that they started the project off with having all the women write down their dreams. All of them wrote something similar. They didn't want big houses. They didn't want vacations. They didn't want anything else besides to have their family together and be proud of their family business, be proud of their work. They wanted their children to get educated and come back and work on the family farm. That's all they wanted. They wanted to have a better life together. The group was founded in September of 2010. It took two courageous women, just two. They were overwhelmed by the lack of money, lack of support from their spouses, improper handling of household income and the typical machismo that goes on in Latin America. They wanted to break the cycle of poverty for their families. So they asked their husbands to give them just a little pot of land. In other instances, the husbands said no, but they would have written them the land. And then in other instances, they asked for micro loans where they were able to get some plots. Their local cooperative provided them with some seedlings. The objective was to integrate the family into farm activities, highlight the valuable role of women, achieve recognition from their husbands that they were capable of doing these things, implement good agriculture practices, provide the family with training on income, financial literacy, and biodiversity protection, enhance food security, and start to improve and produce the highest quality of coffee. Before the project, 80% of these women had never had any interaction with anyone else or other women. After four years of the project, most of the women have now planted at least a hectare and have it in production, and they have 5,000 trees planted. Because food security is one of the main pillars, they now grow food crops like corn, black beans, peas, and vegetables. Food security is no longer a concern for this community. Today, they have the respect of their husbands, and together they work on the farm, sard by side, they sell the coffee, and the additional income has increased the prosperity and the community is doing much better. Weela is also gaining a reputation in the coffee industry as a whole, as a place to look for high quality coffee. One of the world's poorest nations, Burundi, is heavily reliant on coffee. 70% of all their exports is coffee. Of their 10 million people, three million people are in coffee, and 60% of them do not have enough to eat. They do not have enough food. Their government does not have enough money to fund the programs that are needed to feed them, and when you can't put food on your table, you're not going to invest in your farm, so when you don't invest in your farms, your future is unstable. In Burundi, only men are allowed to own land, and only men are allowed to receive money. Isabella Simanie, another brave, brave woman, who happens to be somebody I know and love, started the International Women's Coffee Alliance Chapter in Burundi. She also started a program called Indotto Burundi. The program essentially asked for women to say, you come to me, I'm going to train you, but you can't come to me without your husband. You bring your husband and I'm going to train you both. I'm going to train you both on the quality, or on the benefits of improving the quality of your coffee. It took a long time, but she got the men and women to come together. She got the men to agree to allow the women to sign their names, and on a contract that said, I will allow you to receive money from your cherries. I will allow you to do that. Higher quality coffee demands higher prices. When you get higher prices for your coffee, you can get two payments. Typically, a farmer lives off of one payment. If you can get two payments, you can make it through those thin months, a bonus payment, they call it. So Isabella trained both the men and the women on how to produce high quality coffee. And again, the women had to be registered so they can receive this extra money. Guess what happened when they started to include the women? They improved their quality and they started to win what's called a cup of excellence competitions. Cup of excellence competitions and coffee basically is a designation that says, your coffee is really good. Your coffee can now demand a premium. And they started to attract the attention of buyers. Their coffee can now be found in Portland, Maine and Berkeley, California. This is a photo of the women delivering the bonus that came out of these extra premiums. As I understand this year just recently, they actually had two women delivering the bonus and they were on motorcycles. This bonus will ensure that this community can survive. This bonus is not aid. This bonus is not charity. This bonus is something that the community did together. This is something that will sustain them forever. The IWCA, International Women's Coffee Alliance, is positioned to do more and go further. We now have 20 chapters in coffee producing regions around the globe. Our newest ones are Cameroon, Japan, Mexico and Peru. Coming soon, Indonesia, Australia, Spain, Portugal, and we have interest from Ireland. Through these chapters, women come together, identify and solve their own problems that are unique to their country. As you see, some of these are in consuming countries, not just producing countries. That's very, very unique to our model. Essentially, what that means is producing countries have immediate market access because the consuming countries will buy their product. That's essentially what they're there for. Any work to reduce hunger and help smallholder farming families improve their lives in order to keep producing the things that we love, like your cup of coffee, cannot succeed without addressing the role of women. These women on this page, Sunilini Menon, Ambula Masasu, and Tomoko Nagasi, are just a few of the faces that reflect the women working together around the world to ensure that we are included, we are counted, and we are valued. Experts agree that no trade association or nonprofit is going to take the place of a well-designed regulation in enforcement, resources, reach, and power. What we seek is collaboration at local trade and policy level. So far, our message is being heard. We currently have a wonderful working relationship with the International Trade Center. But we need more, because we need it to happen quicker. Otherwise, you're going to run out of coffee. I guarantee that. So I hope that all of you coffee lovers out there will start to listen to our message higher and you will support us. And if you have influence over enforcement, reach and power, that you will tell our story. Thank you. Thank you, Jennifer. Next is Dr. Krista Jacobs. Hi, good morning, everyone. I am currently at USAID, one of our gender advisors, in the Feed the Future program, which is the US government's interagency, interdepartment initiative on agriculture and food security. In Feed the Future, we have two top-line goals that we talk a lot about. The first of them is inclusive agricultural growth. And by inclusive, we mean the poor and women are both a part of driving that growth and benefiting from it. Our second top-line goal that we talk a lot about is improved nutrition for women and young children. We're not going to achieve either of those without engaging women and men together in agriculture and women and men together in nutrition. Unfortunately today, I don't have many remarks, so please ask me later on engaging men in nutrition. I'll mostly be talking about women in agriculture. And engaging and empowering women in agriculture is a deliberate part of Feed the Future's strategic approach. So why women in agriculture? We've talked a little bit about that now and last night. We want everyone to be empowered in agriculture. However, there are and have been historic and systemic barriers both in the societies we work in and as well in our own agricultural programming that have disproportionately disadvantaged women. I'll give examples of some of the gender gaps that we do know about. Women, small farmers are much less likely to use purchased agricultural inputs. Seeds, fertilizers, mechanization. All rural smallholders are credit constrained. Women are five to 10% less likely to be able to access credit. There doesn't currently exist the proper data in the world to be able to say how much land women own and how much land men own. The best estimates we have of that for developing countries suggest that women are 10 to 20% of landholders. And the land that they do access tends to be smaller in area and of less quality. Now, why do we care about these? Yes, we care about it from an equality perspective, but also the best data we have, which again is far from perfect on labor, is that women are 43% of the agricultural labor force in developing countries. You're simply not going to have sustainable agricultural growth, let alone inclusive agricultural growth, unless you are taking away some of these barriers and addressing them of almost half of your labor force. And it's been estimated, as Jennifer said, that if women and men were to have, if women's access to productive inputs were to increase the level of men's, that women's yields would increase 20 to 30%. And that could potentially reduce the number of hungry people by 100 million to 150 million. We also know there's a very established literature that has shown that as women's relative income and assets in the family increase, you see better nutrition and health outcomes for children. So women's empowerment in agriculture is enabling us to hit both of our top line goals. Feed the Future has invested a lot in measuring women's empowerment. And that makes me very happy because I'm a data person. So some of the stories I'm going to tell now are through what we're beginning to learn with the data we have. We measure women's empowerment, in Feed the Future, through two main ways. One is a direct measure called the Women's Empowerment and Agriculture Index. And the other is through sex disaggregated data, and I'll talk a little bit about each. The Women's Empowerment and Ag Index, which we affectionately call the UIA, or sometimes the index, was created for Feed the Future. And all of our 19 focused countries are accountable for measuring it periodically and accountable for improving it. And part of my job is to help them figure out how they're going to improve it. What's different about it is that we talk in the population based surveys that we do periodically, we talk with a woman and a man in the same household and ask them the same set of questions about five different dimensions or domains that the literature has shown. When women do better in these domains, household agricultural productivity increases. So these domains are rooted in the literature and the evidence. These domains include decision making in agriculture, what gets grown, how it gets grown, is it getting marketed, what prices are we getting for it based on who we're selling to. It includes access to and control over resources, resources like land, financial services and credit services, mechanization, storage, even transportation services. There's control over income, there's social capital, which we look at as being able to participate in groups and having a voice in public speaking. So how you, avenues you have for information and ways you have to voice your own needs. And finally, something we've talked a lot about so far, time allocation and workload. How much are you working and who's making those decisions? And so this index asks women and men these sets of questions so we're able to see how women are doing, how men are doing and how women and men in the same household are doing relatively. When we had our first round of data collection we had 13 countries and we had the results for those and Bangladesh was at the bottom. And what the data said were the biggest constraints to women's empowerment and agriculture and where we work in Bangladesh were lack of control over income, really no group participation and no public speaking. And the Bangladesh mission in USAID said, well, we're not very surprised by this. This aligns with what we're seeing, women are doing a lot of the work but they're not making those income decisions and they're not really seen as visible. This is a society where women are spending a lot of time very, very close to the household and there are severe mobility restrictions in Bangladesh. So the mission said, well, we're not surprised but we're not happy about it either. And so we are going to begin to change some of our existing programs and build new ones to address these specific constraints that this index has helped us to see here's where we know now we need to do more work. So among some of the things they did were to work with community leaders to create village groups for women where there hadn't been before, work with the groups that they were already doing work with to improve their organizational capacity, make them more sustainable. So everything from how do you run a group and keep members, how do you manage savings and have some financial sustainability for the group, public speaking, having the women in the groups demonstrate to each other and to the community some of the agricultural techniques that they were learning. They also linked these groups with another project they were doing, training agricultural extensionists, so you have an audience now and these women have information and training some of these agricultural extensionists in crops and techniques that were more relevant to what women were working on. To address the income, they trained several of the groups in business skills and in grafting small fruit trees which is a relatively low capital endeavor, something that can be done more flexibly, time-wise and is a relatively quick turnaround. And so this is an example of how one mission was able to use some of this new data to adjust their programming. Now for sex disaggregated data, it's a very simple idea and a very powerful practice. What this means is that instead of asking, well how many farmers did we train? How much money did we give out in loans? How many people did we train in nutrition programming? We're instead asking how many women and men did we train in agricultural practices? What was the amount of money that women were extended in loans? Same for men. And some of the things that we've been able to see now that we have a few years of data on several of our indicators are that we are closing the gap in women and men being trained in agricultural practices and to a lesser degree in nutrition. That gap is starting to go away. We are closing much more slowly a gap in women and men applying agricultural technologies. That gap is still very much present. We don't yet have the data to see how that's going for yields. So we're able to say, well, we're reaching more women. We're beginning to change how they farm and the jury is still out on how that's affecting their yields. We've also been able to see the results of several countries very deliberate efforts to bring more women into their training. Some of this is done by groups as in Bangladesh. Other countries made very specific choices in what commodities they were going to focus on by saying, we want to work where women work. So horticulture in Guatemala and Honduras, rain fed rice and Senegal, legumes in Zambia and Malawi. We also have an example of a program in Guatemala that doesn't just train men farmers. Doesn't just train farmers in a group. They actually train families together so that you are reaching everyone in the household who's doing that agricultural work, whether they're getting the credit for it or are publicly seen to be doing it or not. There's a relatively new for me story coming out of Malawi where we're working in soy and ground nut value chains and legumes and about slightly more than two thirds of the producers we work with there are women and this was a deliberate choice by the Malawi mission. So we looked at sexist aggregated data for training application of technologies and yields. And when we did that, we saw, wow, lots more women and men are being trained. That training gap is actually closing. And we saw that between 2013 and 2015 there was more than a doubling of these agricultural technologies being applied to the soy and legumes. And some of these technologies include improved and certified seeds, inoculant that you put on the soy to increase nitrogen fixation for both yield and for the soil, management of mold and aflatoxins and row planting and seed spacing. So we said, wow, this is great. We're seeing that go up. And when you look at the application by women and by men of these different technologies, you saw many more women applying them and you saw them applying the technologies much earlier. This jived with what people in the field were telling us that, yeah, it's great. Women are early adopters. They're really, they're taking charge of this. Wonderful. And then we looked at the yields. And while everyone's yields have gone up, the gains in women's yields were not at all comparable to men's yields. So now we've got a puzzle, right? Great technology adoption. People are trained. They're adopting the technologies. What's happening with the yields? This is still a mystery we're figuring out. What the project staff have been telling us are that, well, the women we're working with are very time constrained. The technologies that they are choosing are the ones that don't take a lot of time. So they are not choosing as much the row planting and the spacing. They are not choosing the aflatoxin management. They're not choosing to the same degree the inoculant. And these are the technologies that produce the higher gains in yields. So as a data person and a person who works in gender, I'm really excited because now using this data you've found a concrete problem that we can go and solve. And so if we weren't looking at sexist aggregated data, we would not be seeing our successes, our problems, or some of these potential solutions. In terms of things that we're learning overall in the future, we are learning that women will apply these technologies when they are able to and when they are relevant for them. And we need to do more to make these technologies more accessible and more relevant. We have several projects that are working with women to design better soil management technologies, better drip irrigation technologies for the crops and circumstances with smaller land, lesser land, just even different amounts of production that women have. And men will support this process when they see the benefits for their families and when they're involved in the process. That said, there's still any time that you begin changing resources and norms, there still is that potential for tension and there are ways to address that. In my estimation, what Feed the Future has been getting better at comes down to stuff, skills, and services. We can help get the seeds and the fertilizer and the new, greatly designed hand tools out there. We can help people to become better managers of the soil and water to produce safer foods. We can help people learn to adapt to climate change. We can help connect people with services, we can help connect people to markets. We can help get financial services connected to agriculture in general, not just smallholders. What we need to do much more work on and what I believe we are less good at are things that center around those norms. And this still gets back to some of these factors that we saw in the literature are connected to household agricultural productivity. The decision making that happens in agriculture, in the household and in the community, the control over income and women's time. And all of these really center on social norms and expectations for what women's and men's roles are and negotiations that happen between women and men on an individual basis. And so these are the things that as we are getting the stuff, the skills, and the services out there, these other factors I see as this is how we start to get women and men to work more directly in concert with one another for food security. Thank you, Krista. Next we'll have Jodi Prescott. Good morning, everyone. Admiral Howe, Dr. Raun. Thank you so much for the gracious invitation to come speak at this year's conference again and for the opportunity to be part of such a distinguished panel. Last year, Aikosan, Becca, and I presented on the new Japanese National Action Plan and gave a comparative analysis of US, NATO, and Australian efforts to incorporate UNSCR-1325 into military operations. Colonel Fielding, I particularly look forward to finding out how our Australian colleagues are making progress in this regard because of the very significant political push and combined effort that you have within your Ministry of Defense in moving these things forward. This year, however, I'd like to discuss food security and gender in the context of armed conflict and climate change. This picture of a wheat field with mountains in the background is not particularly remarkable. I took it a number of years ago in Zimbabwe province in Afghanistan where I was working on environmental damage claims and crop damage claims against US forces. It was an important experience for me though because it forced me to consider the operational significance of food security and its gender components for the first time. What do we believe that we know about armed conflict, women, and climate change? First, that armed conflict has a differentiated and more severe impact on women in general than it does men. This does not mean that men do not suffer or that, for example, they are not at risk of sexual violence in armed conflict situations. They certainly are. In general, however, across the world and often because of the gender roles that they occupy, women tend to suffer more and differently than men. I believe that this is operationally significant. Second, that as with armed conflict, climate change has a differentiated and more severe impact on women than it does men in general. This does not mean that men will experience climate change in a positive way and it doesn't mean that their experiences may not be unique to them. From my perspective, however, based on the research that I've been doing, these experiences might be significant sociologically, but at this point in time, in terms of looking at the research and the data, I struggled to see an operational significance to them. Third, that climate change, at the very least, can serve as an exacerbator, an accelerator of armed conflict. The empirical basis for this understanding needs much more development, however, for it to be operationally useful in real time. Fourth, we understand that particularly in the developing world, the linkages between food security, physical security, water security, and energy security are very strong and that there's a very significant gender component to these linkages. Not only are developing countries among those nations likely to be affected by climate change first, they often lack the capital and the human resources to be able to effectively mitigate climate change or to adapt to it. Generally speaking, developing countries also appear more likely than developed countries to experience outbreaks of armed conflict, at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall. In many developing countries, women and girls are already more vulnerable to stressors such as war and climate change because they often have an inferior socioeconomic status. In these situations, I fear that there is a compounding nonlinear relationship between armed conflict and climate change on these most vulnerable population cohorts. This then has the potential to lead to a perfect storm of gender differentiated suffering in the midst of general political, social, and economic instability and insecurity. So where does food security fit into this gender context? To better appreciate this, it is useful briefly to look at three functional areas of women's involvement in food production where they often face detrimental discrimination. Not going to go into depth on these because quite frankly, Krista and Jennifer have already hit many of the important examples that highlight how important these areas are. But for example, with the unequal access to resources, as mentioned, often women do not have the same access to loans or credit. With regard to the opportunity to change or improve their livelihoods, the gender roles that women have in different countries and cultures often keep them involved in time-intensive chores for which they are not paid, such as gathering biomass for fuel. Girls gathering firewood have little time for school, particularly as climate change directly and indirectly affects vegetation patterns, and the girls must range ever farther to collect the same amount of British thermal units for the daily cooking for the home. Third, women are often excluded from decision-making regarding resource allocation, such as water allotments for irrigation, even though they in fact might be the primary users of this water. I first heard the term stability operations in the context of Bosnia in the mid 1990s when I was in US Army Europe. Military staffs were having to come to grips with the notion that NATO's first out-of-area deployment was unlikely to offer any of the high intensity conflict that everyone had been training for. What mattered now were civilian-centric operations. Staff meetings featured cognitive dissonance in coming to grips with this reality. General Sir Rupert Smith has described these operations as wars amongst the people. In light of the gender roles that women have in many of the countries that are likely to be impacted first by conflict and climate change, it is difficult to see how civilian-centric operations can succeed unless it is recognized operationally that men's and women's security needs and experiences are not identical. However, the question for the US forces, these that will find themselves engaged in these operations is this. How well are they organized and equipped to understand these needs? My assessment at this point in time is, despite the hard work done by many of the people in this room, not very much. Let me give you an example of the nature of the problem as I see it. Dr. Richard Byrne, a senior lecturer at Harper Adams University in the UK, has conducted a great deal of field research and fieldwork on food security in the context of stabilization operations. In a presentation he gave last year, the link to which I have included on the slide, he talked about a pilot project in which he was involved in Burundi, which, as Jennifer has mentioned, has had experiences with food insecurity. This pilot project used military personnel to conduct agricultural surveys to develop the mission's understanding of food security in the area in which they were working. Now, as we noted, Burundi has experienced food insecurity issues, and those issues might explain, for example, why there might be little affordable food in urban markets. In one particular area, though, the ordinary metrics that might be tracked to gauge food security, such as fertilizer availability, or the safety of the roads from the farms to the markets, all were good. Yet there was still little affordable food in the urban markets for the urban dwellers to buy. Fortunately, the surveys that the military personnel were conducting had a gender component to them. When the women of farm families were interviewed, they explained that often the soldiers who were patrolling the roads and keeping them safe from troublemakers, were they themselves levying unofficial taxes on the women as they took their crops to market. This discouraged the women from going to market, and we can see how potentially this would lead to imminent food security issues in the urban areas as townspeople ran out of nutritious food, and longer term food security issues in the countryside, perhaps as farmers turned their focus towards subsistence crops and missed opportunities to earn cash, to give them some resilience to buy better supplies and seed. Five years after the publication of the U.S. National Action Plan and the tasking of the Department of Defense to include gender considerations and operations, surely U.S. doctrine that is geared towards civilian-centric operations reflects this level of operational savvy demonstrated in the pilot program, right? No, it does not. The short answer is simply no. Joint Chiefs of Staff level doctrine for four of the most civilian-centric operations is essentially silent on the operational significance and relevance of gender. One might assume, for example, that perhaps the most civilian-centric of all operations, civil-military operations, would at least deal with the operational significance of gender, at least with the start of a meaningful way. It does not, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff level in doctrine all the way down to the training manuals. Now, I would be dreadfully naive if I believed that everybody follows doctrine or whether, in fact, they read it very often. But it is important because it sets a baseline for our education of our military personnel, a baseline for their training. Also, it's going to set a baseline for resourcing, personnel and units. However, in planning and operations, people, staff sections, units, they are not likely to easily incorporate things they have never worked with into the work that they are doing in a time-constrained hectic environment. By itself, this silence is, at the very least, discouraging and inefficient. When coupled with the U.S. military's approach to climate change, however, it is simply alarming. The U.S. military seems to be taking a two-pronged approach to dealing with climate change. At home, we're hardening our installations to the effects of climate change and reducing the amount of fossil fuel we consume in order to mitigate the damage we cause. Abroad, however, our focus seems to be on assisting partner nations in responding to crisis situations that would result from climate change. What is missing is a recognition of climate change as a process in these theaters, a process with differentiated impacts on different population cohorts, particularly women and girls. An exception to this way of thinking is perhaps the national guard's use of the agricultural development teams. They were used in Afghanistan prior to the change in mission. The ADTs were composed of guardsmen and guardswomen with agricultural talents, and they had reach-back capability to their respective land-grant universities and their states for training and technical expertise. Importantly, in country, they provided their own security and transportation, and in many cases, later rotations of ADTs went back to the same area where the previous ones had been, building that oh, so rare commodity of continuity in an operational area. Also important, they were headed by 06s. That makes a difference. These later rotations also took a gendered approach to promoting agricultural practices that would be sustainable, at least from their perspective, once Western forces pulled out. For example, the 2nd Georgia ADT supported a number of projects that focused on women through its use of a women's initiatives training team, including the restoration of watershed areas that required the contractor to purchase saplings from women who had received basic literacy, instruction at a school, and had been trained on growing crops suitable for their home compounds, their collats, such as baby trees. In attempting to reset the watershed's capacities, this project sought to reverse the process of deforestation, which is successful, would build capacity in the ecosystem to buffer climate changes and facts. Unfortunately, as with the female engagement teams, the ADTs seem to have been largely forgotten by the active duty force, and I find no place carved out for them in doctrine. Further, there were unresolved concerns among civilian development workers whether this was really a proper role for the military to be engaging in at all. But regardless, this is at least an example of the military treating environmental restoration as a process rather than a fact in theater and appreciating its operational significance. So I believe that for US forces to have a greater likelihood of success in future civilian-centric operations in a time of climate change, they must organizationally confront the non-linear compounding effect of armed conflict and climate change on women and girls explicitly. Stability therefore must be considered to have a large sustainability component in the way of food, physical, water, and energy security, which must include the operational relevance of gender. Quantifying the operational relevance of gender though, establishing the business case, generating the data, that will require resources and a great deal of political will. Up until this point in time, at least within DOD, this does not seem to have happened. Thank you very much for your kind attention and the opportunity to speak to you again, and I look forward to your questions.