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Cnihill, 3-7-2023, "Senate Democrat pushes for expansion to copyright act to include generative AI research," FedScoop, https://fedscoop.com/senate-democrat-pushes-for-expansion-to-copyright-act-to-include-generative-ai-research/

An exemption under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act should be expanded to include generative artificial intelligence research focused specifically on embedded biases in AI systems and models, a top Senate Democrat argued in a new letter to the Library of Congress. In the letter, shared exclusively with FedScoop, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., urged the LOC’s copyright office to expand an existing “good-faith security research exemption” to include research that exists outside of traditional security concerns, such as bias, arguing that it would be the best path for ensuring a “robust security ecosystem” for tools such as generative AI. The letter from Warner, co-chair of the Senate Cybersecurity Caucus, is in response to a petition from Jonathan Weiss, founder of the IT consulting firm Chinnu Inc., that asked the LOC to establish a new exemption to address security research on generative AI models and systems. A spokesperson for Warner said in an email that an expansion to the exemption rather than an entirely new exemption “is the best way to extend the existing protections that have enabled a robust cybersecurity research ecosystem to the emerging issues surrounding safe AI.” Advertisement Warner’s letter mirrors a Department of Justice response to the same petition last month. The Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the DOJ’s Criminal Division wrote that “good faith research on potentially harmful outputs of AI and similar algorithmic systems should be similarly exempted from the DMCA’s circumvention provisions.” Said Warner: “It is crucial that we allow researchers to test systems in ways that demonstrate how malfunctions, misuse and misoperation may lead to an increased risk of physical or psychological harm.” The Virginia Democrat, who has introduced bipartisan legislation on artificial intelligence security and emerging tech standards, pointed to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s AI Risk Management Framework to acknowledge that AI’s risks “differ from traditional software risks in key ways,” opening the door for not only security vulnerabilities but also dangerous and biased outputs. The use of generative AI for fraud and non-consensual image generation are among the deceptive practices Warner noted as reasons for consumer protections, such as watermarks and content credentials. Additionally, the lawmaker asked the LOC to ensure that the potential expanded exemption “does not immunize” research that would intentionally undermine protective measures. “Absent very clear indicia of good faith, efforts that undermine provenance technology should not be entitled to the expanded exemption,” Warner said. The senator also asked the LOC to include security and safety vulnerabilities, especially involving bias and additional harmful outputs, in its expanded good-faith security research definition. In response to Warner’s letter, Weiss said in an email to FedScoop that he doesn’t “care whether the existing exemption is expanded to include research on AI bias/harmful output, or whether an entirely new exemption is created. Our main concern is to secure protections for good faith research on these emerging intelligent systems, whose inner workings even the brightest minds in the world cannot currently explain.” The Weiss petition and letters from DOJ and Warner were prompted by the LOC Copyright Office’s ninth triennial rulemaking proceeding, which accepts public input for new exemptions to the DMCA.

But it also reflected a more disturbing reality for the 79-year-old president: in the space of just 17 months, he has already burnt a lot of the political capital he had when he walked into the Oval Office in January last year.

According to the Realclearpolitics.com polling average, just 39.6 per cent of voters approve of Biden’s performance in the White House so far, compared with 54.9 per cent who disapprove — a wide gap of 15 percentage points that will be hard to close.

As David Roberts of Vox observes: In 2009, Obama and his aides made the mistake of thinking that their major initiatives had to be rolled out one at a time in sequence, because he had a finite store of “political capital” that had to be spent carefully. But political capital is not something that exists apart from any particular issue; it isn’t a special sauce that has to be poured on a policy in order to make it palatable.

And with the parties as polarized and unified as they are, political capital has become all but meaningless. There may have been a time when a popular president possessed so much capital that a senator from the opposition party would feel compelled to support him on part of that president’s agenda, but that time is long gone. There is no account Biden can draw on to turn Republican “no” votes into “yes.”

The U.S. House Agriculture Committee on Friday released a highly anticipated farm bill draft. This draft includes measures to cut spending on food assistance for the poor and to support farmers in combating climate change. These provisions have drawn significant opposition from Democrats.

According to Reuters, passing a farm bill this session faces significant challenges in Congress due to the substantial differences between the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-majority Senate. The proposed bill is projected to cost $1.5 trillion over the next decade.

Congress kicked the can down the road by failing to negotiate a new farm bill last year. The bill has been extended through the end of September, but experts say it won't be easy for lawmakers to approve a new plan. During his 30 years of farming, Mark Recker has seen a lot of farm bills make their way through Congress, as the legislation comes up for renewal every five years. "And it seems like as the years go by, farm bills get harder and harder to pass," Recker said. Getting a farm bill approved this time could turn into an even taller order. Congress chose to extend the 2018 Farm Bill last year instead of developing a new plan, and President Biden signed an extension that runs through September. Ag experts worry that it will be tough for lawmakers to reach an agreement on a package that's expected to cost more than $1 trillion. "In this presidential election year, national politics is going to get in the way," said Brent Johnson, president of Iowa Farm Bureau. "And we really don't need this farm bill to be extended into the new administration. That's going to be a really long time." He estimates the farm bill will cost more than $1.3 trillion over five years. He said farmers in the Midwest need a finished package that helps mitigate risk, keep producers in business, and care for the environment. Johnson, who also serves on the board of directors for the American Farm Bureau Federation, has lobbied agricultural committee members to fast-track the farm bill. "I've been working a lot with Senators John Boozman, Debbie Stabenow, and Representative G.T. Thompson. We're just trying to make sure our priorities are heard," Johnson said. "It's just a matter of getting through the politics of Washington." Top concerns for Johnson and other agricultural leaders focus on making sure programs aimed at producers are fully funded. The farm bill includes programs for commodity price support, crop insurance, trade and conservation initiatives. Yet the largest share of the farm bill’s funding, more than 80%, goes toward food programs through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. "I've had way too many conversations with food banks and some of those organizations that are really being overrun with demand," Johnson said. "So, there is a real need after the COVID-era for food stability." He’s pushing for lawmakers to finish the legislation and get it to the president's desk during the first quarter of the year. Yet it’s likely it will take lawmakers longer to finalize a plan, according to Chad Hart, an agriculture economist with Iowa State University. "If you look back at the last three or four times we've renewed the farm bill, it tends to be delayed. It tends to be something if you will get kicked down the road for a while before Congress gets its act together and finally gives us the next farm bill," Hart said. He predicts Congress will likely hold steady on what's contained in the farm bill, even if they want to avoid additional burden on the budget. "That's basically what a one-year extension did anyway," Hart said. "It's not seen as effective of a safety net as it was 20 years ago. At the same time, I think farmers have gotten used to delays and interruptions with the farm bill," Hart said. Recker, who grows corn and soybeans in northeast Iowa, doesn’t expect a solution anytime soon. "That's due to a lack of bi-partisanship and the higher cost of the plan — there's a lot of issues going on," Recker added. "Congress passed 27 bills last year. So, it's not known for doing a lot. So, it's not surprising that this farm bill didn't get done."

A battle that ties food aid for needy families with crop subsidies for American farmers may stall efforts to renew a sweeping agricultural policy law, forcing Congress to consider delaying action on the $1.5 trillion proposal until after this fall’s elections.

The law, known as the farm bill, is set to expire Sept. 30. It typically draws bipartisan support because it combines resources for such programs as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for low-income families with updates to farm supports, including commodity price guarantees and crop insurance.

Despite recent progress on the 2024 Farm Bill — including passage of the House Agriculture Committee’s version of the bill and competing frameworks released in the Senate Agriculture Committee — lawmakers in recent days have been hinting that passage of a full Farm Bill in 2024 is growing more unlikely and that another extension of the 2018 Farm Bill remains the most likely outcome before an end of September deadline. Agri-Pulse’s Steve Davies, Philip Brasher, Noah Wicks, and Rebekah Alvey reported this past Friday that “a farm bill doesn’t appear to be headed anywhere in the Senate, even though Ag Committee Republicans have now outlined their proposal. Senate Ag Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., doesn’t think the House Ag Committee’s bill can pass the House and fears a Senate bill could face the same fate, she says on this week’s Agri-Pulse Newsmakers.” Senate Ag Committee Ranking Member Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich) “‘I don’t want to bring a bill out of the committee in the Senate that has the same fate’ as the House bill, she says,” according to Davies, Brasher, Wicks and Alvey. “Stabenow has rejected the GOP proposals in part because of cuts to nutrition spending and their removal of climate guardrails on Inflation Reduction Act funding. ‘The way you get a farm bill is making sure everybody’s happy. And so that recognition hasn’t happened yet,’ she said.” In addition, Brownfield Ag News’ Brent Barnett reported Friday that “U.S. Senator Roger Marshall says a new farm bill isn’t likely to get passed this year.” “‘I think we’re looking at another extension and I’m sorry to say that,’ he said,” according to Barnett. “‘I’m not going to do a bad bill. This is a five-year bill. We have to get it right.'” Where is the Bill in the Legislative Process? While lawmakers have recently signaled that a full Farm Bill is unlikely to pass in 2024, Progressive Farmer’s Joshua Baethge reported this past Friday that odds remain quite low that a full Farm Bill will pass this year because lawmakers have completed only a very small percentage of the steps required for a Farm Bill to become law. “Looking at the legislative process from an uber simplistic perspective, eight things that need to happen for a new farm bill to become reality: The agriculture committees in the House and Senate need to pass a bill. The full House and Senate must then approve those bills. When that happens, a committee will likely be created to hammer out a compromise between the two bills. The full House and Senate must then approve the compromise The President would then need to sign the bill into law. In case you weren’t counting, that’s eight separate steps that need to be completed,” Baethge reported. “So far, lawmakers have finished one. In May, the House Agriculture Committee passed Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson’s Farm, Food, and National Security Act. That means one-eighth of the process has been completed.”

The U.S. House Agriculture Committee’s version of the farm bill will not get support from U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Lansing, who chairs the Senate committee responsible for handling the appropriations bill. Stabenow told the Michigan Advance after an event in Lansing Wednesday morning that this farm bill process has been the “most frustrating” of her career. “I’ve actually been involved in six farm bills and led on three of them, and this has been the most frustrating time,” said Stabenow, who chairs the U.S. Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, and is retiring this term. “Because it’s so much more partisan than usual and particularly around food assistance.” The farm bill is a $1.5 trillion federal legislation package that creates policy and appropriates funding to food, agriculture and conservation programs. The bill expires every five years, and the most recently passed legislation was set to expire in September 2023. The 2018 farm bill received an extension through the end of September 2024, putting pressure on lawmakers to finish a deal before the November election. The framework from GOP senators reflected the GOP-led House panel’s version, which passed with votes from every Republican and four Democrats on the committee. Stabenow said the version is “just not balanced.” U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow addresses children about free summer meals at Waverly East School in Lansing on June 26, 2024. (Photo by Lucy Valeski/Michigan Advance) “The politics of food has gotten, very, very, very partisan and very, very disheartening to me,” Stabenow said. “Because traditionally, we’ve been able to come together around those issues.” U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Holly, a member of the House Agriculture Committee, told the Advance after a May 31 event in Traverse City that she doesn’t believe that GOP cuts to food assistance will make it into the final bill. “This was the thing that was so hard about last week, is that the farm bill draft in the House had a bunch of bills that I care about and I voted against it. Because they just slashed food assistance — they slashed SNAP, so food stamps, all kinds of agricultural programs for our farmers markets, school lunch programs, you name it,” Slotkin said. “So I couldn’t vote for it. I think that it will not pass muster; those kinds of things will not make it into law — most importantly because we have Debbie Stabenow as the chairwoman of the Senate Ag Committee and she’s absolutely not going to stand for that.” Slotkin is running for the open U.S. Senate seat and will face actor Hill Harper in the Aug. 6 Democratic primary. On the GOP side, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, former U.S. Rep. Justin Amash, physician Sherry O’Donnell and businessman Sandy Pensler are running. The farm bill has 12 areas, or titles, that need to be passed together, including commodity programs, conservation and nutrition. Stabenow said eight of the 12 titles have been agreed upon, but there are sticking points in other areas. Slotkin said in Traverse City that she was focused on promoting “positive and sustainable farming. “I always want to be able to have America feed itself by itself, but you can incentivize healthier farming practices, better environmentally sound practices by incentivizing farmers to do the right things, instead of trying to just punish them when they do the wrong things,” she said. She noted that Michigan has a lot of small and medium farmers and she said crop insurance does not work well for them. Instead, she wants to see the safety net expanded for farmers. Slotkin also said that the U.S. has to invest more into scientific crop research and conservation efforts for land and water. The House version of the bill removed some money that would go to farmers to fund conservation projects in agriculture. The version also changed the formula for calculating food benefits programs. Stabenow said these cuts helped fund farm subsidy programs, primarily for larger southern farms and that GOP lawmakers have “doubled down” on those priorities. “The House of Representatives wants to take money out of the nutrition title to fund big farm subsidies that we’ve never done before, and I’m not going to let that happen,” Stabenow said. Stabenow said she thinks the outlined commodity programs that benefit larger industries primarily help bigger farms in southern states, which many GOP lawmakers represent.

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson is turning his attention to winning over Republicans and a few more Democrats to his farm bill as he envisions a potential floor debate in September. But getting the legislation signed into law is still as elusive as ever.

In a best-case scenario, lawmakers could feasibly work out a deal in a lame duck session. But depending on the outcome of the election, experts say, the bill could easily get punted to the next Congress. Feasibly, a Republican Congress and White House could use the budget reconciliation process to pass much of Thompson's bill with little or no Democratic support.

House Republicans’ new farm bill proposal is drawing opposition from a coalition of left- and right-wing groups that agree on little else.

The proposed version of the $1.5 trillion omnibus unveiled last week by House Agriculture Committee Chair Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.) includes several priorities of big agribusiness — proposals that frustrated both right-aligned groups such as the Heritage Foundation and left-leaning ones including the Environmental Working Group amid progressives’ and populists’ broader dislike of what they see as crony capitalism at the U.S. farmstand.

TOLEDO, Iowa — Iowa’s U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley is pessimistic when it comes to the prospects of passing a new Farm Bill yet this year.

Grassley, speaking Monday to The Gazette, said Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Agriculture Committee can’t seem to reach an agreement on spending priorities. The sprawling package that’s reauthorized every five years supports several key farm and safety net programs, like crop insurance, as well as agriculture research, rural development, conservation, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits — once called food stamps — and more.

A partisan fight over federal food support programs is posing a major challenge to both chambers as they try to craft a mammoth farm bill ahead of an early fall deadline.

Congress has just four months until a Sept. 30 deadline to finish work on the bill, after both parties agreed to kick the can last year on the bill.

There’s been recent progress toward a 2024 Farm Bill, but is it fast enough?

Farm Policy News from the University of Illinois says lawmakers have hinted that passage of a full farm bill this year is growing more unlikely. Another extension of the 2018 Farm Bill remains the most likely outcome before the end of the current extension in September.

The recent House Agriculture Committee vote is just the first step in a long process to enact new Farm Bill legislation.

To advance the Farm Bill, the House will need to send it to the floor for a vote by the full House of Representatives. There is a lot of uncertainty about when or if that will happen in 2024. House Agriculture Committee Chairman G.T. Thompson (R-PA) has said he doesn’t anticipate the bill will go for a floor vote before September due to the work taking place this summer on annual appropriations legislation (which must pass by September 30 to keep the federal government funded).

WASHINGTON — The U.S. House Agriculture Committee Friday released the draft bill text of the long-awaited $1.5 trillion farm bill, which is likely to face opposition in the Senate from Democrats due to disagreements over federal anti-hunger programs and climate change requirements. The chair of the committee, GOP Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson of Pennsylvania, said in a statement that the bill, which will set farm, nutrition, commodity and conservation policy for the next five years, is a “product of extensive feedback from stakeholders and all Members of the House, and is responsive to the needs of farm country through the incorporation of hundreds of bipartisan policies.” The legislation funds programs across 12 titles for five years. It would boost rural farming, promote a new global market for farmers to sell their products abroad, require new reporting requirements for the foreign purchase of farmland, increase funding for specialty crops and expand eligibility for disaster assistance, among other initiatives. “The markup is one step in a greater House process, that should not be compromised by misleading arguments, false narratives, or edicts from the Senate,” Thompson said. Markup expected Thursday The House Agriculture Committee plans to mark up the 942-page bill on Thursday. It is expected to cost $1.5 trillion over 10 years. A title-by-title summary can be found here. In a statement, the top Democrat on the committee, Rep. David Scott of Georgia, slammed the draft bill for “taking food out of the mouths of America’s hungry children, restricting farmers from receiving the climate-smart conservation funding they so desperately need, and barring the USDA from providing financial assistance to farmers in times of crisis.” Scott warned that the current draft bill is unlikely to pass the House. Although Republicans have a slim majority, any piece of legislation will have to be bipartisan in order to make it through the Senate, which Democrats control. The current farm bill extension expires Sept. 30. On the Senate side, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat who leads the Senate Committee on Agriculture, released Democrats’ own proposal in early May. Among other things, it would boost eligibility for nutrition programs for low-income people like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Stabenow made public a summary of the bill, but not legislative text. Scott and Stabenow released a joint statement Tuesday following a meeting with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Democrats on the House Agriculture committee. They advocated for Republicans to craft a bipartisan farm bill. “House Republicans are undermining this goal by proposing policies that split the broad, bipartisan coalition that has always been the foundation of a successful farm bill,” they wrote. “We need a farm bill that holds the coalition together and upholds the historic tradition of providing food assistance to our most vulnerable Americans while keeping our commitment to our farmers battling the effects of the climate crisis every day,” they continued. Democrats oppose climate-smart, SNAP changes The House bill has a few provisions that Democrats oppose. One would remove climate-smart policy requirements for about $13 billion in conservation projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act. Another would limit future updates to the Thrifty Food Plan, the formula that calculates benefits for SNAP. “The economic impact of the SNAP cuts alone would be staggering,” Scott said. A freeze in the Thrifty Food Plan would result in a roughly $30 billion SNAP cut over the next decade, according to the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. There are more than 41 million people who use SNAP benefits, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. However, the House farm bill would remove the ban on low-income Americans who have a drug conviction felony from obtaining SNAP benefits. Environmental groups are also opposing the draft of the farm bill, raising concerns about reallocating IRA money and including a bill relating to how states regulate animal practices. A watchdog group that focuses on government and corporate accountability in water, food and corporate overreach, Food & Water Watch Managing Director of Policy and Litigation Mitch Jones said in a statement that the draft bill would gut important climate-smart provisions. “Some of leadership’s more dangerous proposals would take us backwards on animal welfare, and climate-smart agriculture,” Jones said. “It’s time Congress put the culture wars aside and got back to work on a Farm Bill that puts consumers, farmers, and the environment above politicking and Big Ag handouts.”

WASHINGTON — Republicans moved their long-awaited new farm bill through the U.S. House Agriculture Committee last week, despite opposition from most Democrats about cuts in SNAP payments and nutritional benefits that could stall further advancement.

The massive $1.5 trillion legislation would set policy and funding levels for key food, agriculture and conservation programs for the next five years. After a marathon markup Thursday, the GOP-authored bill cleared the committee after midnight Friday, 33-21, with four Democratic votes.

Forest protection, once the “forgotten” climate solution, has become an integral pillar of climate discussions. But while attention has largely focused on forests like those of the Amazon and Indonesia, the climate doesn’t hinge just on what happens in the tropics. It also depends on the boreal; the temperate rainforests of the Pacific; the conifer forests of the Rockies; the Northeastern coastal forests; the Southern wetland forests. These forests in North America are being lost or stripped of carbon rich mature trees right under our noses and need to remain standing and intact if we are going to achieve a climate-safe, sustainable future. As the Biden administration looks to act on its to reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% by 2030, it needs to embrace a bold new vision for forest protection that looks at how we can protect the climate-critical forest resources in our own backyard. 

North America’s forests, the homelands of Indigenous communities and havens of rich biodiversity, are some of the most carbon-dense areas on Earth. These forests are part of the global forest respiratory system that, each year, absorbs one-third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. They are also gatekeepers of vast stores of carbon locked safely out of the atmosphere in their soils and biomass. The Canadian boreal forest alone stores twice as much carbon as the world’s oil reserves, while U.S. forests collectively absorb the equivalent of about 12 percent of the nation’s annual carbon pollution. Their sentry stands between us and climate catastrophe. 

This Committee has a very important job ahead of us – passing the next Farm Bill with strong, bipartisan support, and it’s our job to make sure it supports our farmers, our families, and our environment.

Our farmers have a critical job to do as well – growing food, fiber and fuel for our country and our world while also protecting our land and water. This is nothing new for those of us in Michigan, where protecting the Great Lakes is part of our DNA.

In his book, The Coming Famine, Julian Cribb writes that the wars of the 21st century will involve failed states, rebellions, civil conflict, insurgencies and terrorism. All of these elements will be triggered by competition over dwindling resources, rather than global conflicts with clearly defined sides. More than 40 countries experienced civil unrest following the food price crisis in 2008. The rapid increase in grain prices and prevailing food insecurity in many states is linked to the outbreak of protests, food riots and the breakdown of governance. Widespread food insecurity is a driving factor in creating a disaffected population ripe for rebellion. Given the interconnectivity of food security and political stability, it is likely food will continue to act as a political stressor on regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere. Addressing Insecurity Improving food and water security and encouraging resource sharing is critical to creating a stable and secure global environment. While food and water shortages contribute to a rising cycle of violence, improving food and water security outcomes can trigger the opposite and reduce the potential for conflict. With the global population expected to reach 9 billion by 2040, the likelihood of conflict exacerbated by scarcity over the next century is growing. Conflict is likely to be driven by a number of factors and difficult to address through diplomacy or military force. Population pressures, changing weather, urbanization, migration, a loss of arable land and freshwater resources are just some of the multi-layered stressors present in many states. Future inter-state conflict will move further away from the traditional, clear lines of military conflict and more towards economic control and influence.

A growing number of studies of environmental stressors and social conflict posit that future wars will be fought over diminishing resources (Miguel et al. 2004; Burke et al. 2009;O ’ Loughlin et al. 2012; Scheffran et al. 2012 ). Building on insights from these studies, as well as other suggestive accounts (e.g. Brinkman and Hendrix 2011 ;Hendrix and Brinkman 2013 ; Messer and Cohen 2006 ;Prunier 2008 ), the present study demonstrates empirically, for the first time, the existence of a systemic relationship between conflict on the one hand, and food (in) security on the other, both globally and locally. Specifically, highly disaggregated cropland-based measures of food insecurity are shown to produce a significant effect on the incidence of inter and intra-state armed conflict worldwide. Unlike the majority of previous studies, which rely primarily on country-level indicators (Miguel et al. 2004 ; Burke et al. 2009 ; Scheffran et al. 2012 ;Buhaug 2010 ) or focus specifically on sub-Saharan Africa (Miguel et al. 2004 ; Burke et al. 2009;O ’ Loughlin et al. 2012;Buhaug 2010; Fjelde and Hultman 2014 ), the present approach uses geographic factors to estimate the regional sub-state distribution of conflict globally. Two agricultural output measures, the percent of cropland in a given region and the amount of cropland per capita within agricultural regions, are used to proxy for the demand and supply aspects of food security, respectively (Barrett 2010 ). Using logistic regression (i.e., logit) models, these measures are then paired with a large number of political, economic, and climatic indicators in order to estimate the direct effects of food security on violent conflict. Evidence suggests that conflict occurs in areas with higher access to, but lower availability of, food resources. Together these findings imply that food insecurity produces an independent effect on contemporary social and political conflict. While relatively little research directly addresses the relationship between food insecurity and conflict specifically, numerous studies have implied that such a relationship exists. For instance, in their analysis of the relationship between climate variability and conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa, Burke et al. found that B [t]emperature variables are strongly related to conflict incidence over our historical panel ^ (2009 , 20,670. See also Miguel et al. 2004 ; Koubi et al. 2012 ). They further hypothesize that, B [t]emperature can affect agricultural yields both through increases in crop evapotranspiration (and hence heightened water stress in the absence of irrigation) and through accelerated crop development...reducing African sta- ple crop yields by 10 % – 30 % per °C of warming ^ (ibid. 20,672). Somewhat more cautiously, O ’ Loughlin et al. conclude that, B [o]ur study and other studies question the evidence that climatic variability is uniformly driving up the risk of conflict in sub-Saharan Africa, ^ while also noting that B the positive association between instability and temperature may result from the harmful effects of high temperatures on food products such as maize ^ (2012, 18,347). While these conclusions were supported by subsequent studies (Raleigh and Kniveton 2012; Hendrix and Salehyan 2012 ;Hsiangand Meng 2014 ), other scholars question the validity of these findings and show that the incidence of conflict is primarily related to political and economic conditions (e.g. Buhaug 2010 ). In common with all these studies, however, is the insight that a major mechanism by which climate change increases the likelihood of conflict is through its effects on food supplies.