Food Systems and Poverty Reduction

A Cornell University Ph.D. training program, open to US citizens and permanent residents, supported by the National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) Program

The Food System and Poverty Reduction IGERT provides competitively selected Cornell PhD students with the conceptual and methodological tools necessary for understanding the structure and dynamics of complex food systems that perpetuate extreme rural poverty. The two year traineeship augments the students’ core disciplinary training during the first two years of their doctoral program.

 

Program faculty will select a cohort of 5-7 students each year for the next four years (2010-2013). Students are funded by the program only for their two year traineeship. Funding includes a $30,000 stipend, fully paid fees and tuition, health insurance and $10,000 in research funding to spend the final half year of IGERT at one of the program’s research sites in East Africa (Ethiopia or Kenya).

 

Eligibility

Funding is restricted to U.S. citizens and permanent residents who have been admitted into a doctoral program at Cornell. For more information on admission requirements and application deadlines, see How to Apply.

 

Text Box: What are food systems? Food systems are human-managed bio-physical systems that regulate the production, distribution and consumption of food. Most of the approximately 1.2 billion poorest people on the planet live in rural areas in developing countries and depend on food systems for their livelihoods. The need for specially-trained scientists Food systems connect spatially- and temporally-distinct sub-systems, such as markets, socio-cultural and/or political organizations and agro-ecosystems. There are complex webs of connections, dynamic linkages and feedback loops between these sub-systems such that perturbations in one part of the system typically affect others. Yet, these are rarely accounted for in discipline specific research designs, policy or institutional or technological interventions, which too often assume that variables other than those under direct consideration remain constant or change in a predictable, linear fashion. The purpose of the Food System and Poverty Reduction program is to provide a new generation of natural and social scientists with the conceptual and methodological tools necessary for understanding how sub-system interactions affect poverty and agroecosystem function. The project’s integrating framework will also help students to understand how their disciplinary research fits into the larger context of food systems research.