IPES-FOOD - Key Persons
Angela Hilmi is a member of the IPES-Food panel, an associate professor research in the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience at Coventry University, and an agronomist socio-economist, experienced in sustainable agriculture and rural development with over thirty years of professional experience in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Caribbean, USA and Europe.
She was awarded the 2001 Prix Export for excellence in private business development, was named French foreign trade advisor by the French Prime Minister in 2002, and has participated as advisor for partnerships and alliances in the UN-FAO Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean. She has in recent years been leading the creation of new financial instruments for the development of agroecology in peasant communities.
Her previous professional work includes secretary of the Strategic Planning Group in the FAO's Office of the Assistant Director-General; senior officer in the Crisis Management Centre for the Food Chain; senior officer in the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture; international development director of Ecocert, a world leader in certification of organic agriculture; programme officer FAO Representation for Tanzania and Seychelles; and natural resources officer, and prevention of food losses officer, at the FAO Rural Development Division. She holds a PhD in social and economical sciences, and an MSc in Biology.
Elisabetta Recine is a member of the IPES-Food panel, a nutritionist and public health expert, and professor in the Department of Nutrition at the University of Brasília, with both academic and governmental expertise in food and nutrition policies and the right to food.
She worked on the implementation of Brazil's Food and Nutrition National Policy (Ministry of Health - 2000-2003). She is president of the Brazilian National Food and Nutrition Security Council (Consea) 2023-2025 - which comprises civil society and government representatives and advises the Presidency of the Republic - a post she also held in 2017-2018. Currently she is also a member of the Observatory for Food and Nutritional Security Policies of the University of Brasília.
She is a longstanding member of the UN's High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition/ Committee on World Food Security (CFS), and board member of various networks including the Brazilian Alliance for Healthy and Adequate Food. Her professional life has been guided by relating different dimensions of food systems to nutrition and the progressive realisation of the right to adequate food. She holds a PhD in Public Health.
Job Titles:
- Member and Founder of the IPES
Emile Frison is a member and founder of the IPES-Food panel, a senior advisor to the Agroecology Coalition, and an expert on agroecology and agricultural biodiversity who has headed global research-for-development organisation Bioversity International for ten years, after holding top positions at several global research institutes.
A Belgian national, he obtained an MSc in Agricultural Science from the Catholic University of Louvain and a PhD from the University of Gembloux in Belgium.
He has spent most of his career in international agricultural research for development, including six years in Africa. He joined the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources in 1987, became regional director for Europe of the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute in 1992, and director of the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain (INIBAP) in 1995. He has been a chair of the board of directors of Ecoagriculture Partners. He is currently a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation. He has a particular interest in sustainable food systems and the deployment of agricultural biodiversity to improve nutrition and the resilience and sustainability of food systems.
Job Titles:
- Corporate Power / Governance & Policy / Local Food Systems
- Member of the IPES
Errol Schweizer is a member of the IPES-Food panel, and has over 30 years of experience in the food industry.
Born and raised in the Bronx, New York, he started out as a stock clerk and grill cook, and has worked at all levels of grocery retail, wholesale and consumer packaged goods. He worked for Whole Foods for 14 years and was responsible for the grocery, dairy, frozen and bulk foods divisions from 2009-2016. In that role, he developed supplier relationships, product assortments, pricing strategies, supply chains and promotions for over 75 product categories and 1,000 suppliers.
He has helped create strict procurement and sourcing standards for consumer trends such as Organic, Non-GMO, fair labor, humanely raised animal products and plant-based processed foods. Since 2016, he has been an advisor and board member for over 20 emerging food brands, grocery cooperatives and independent retailers. He has also worked on local food policy, public food procurement and healthy food access and is a board member of the Non-GMO Project.
He was recently named one of the Project NOSH Grocery Industry Top 50, and was recognized in 2015 by Supermarket News and 2019 by the Hemp Industries Association. He is presenter and co-founder of The Checkout podcast and is a contributor to Forbes and Salon with a focus on food economics, supply chains, labor and technology.
Georgina M. Catacora-Vargas is a member of the IPES-Food panel, and professor at the Academic Peasant Unit ‘Tiawanacu' of the Bolivian Catholic University. She is president of the Latin American Scientific Society of Agroecology, and advisor to the Agroecology Fund. She is an agricultural engineer with a PhD in Agroecology.
For several years she was an advisor to the National Competent Environmental Authority of Bolivia and negotiator in various international agreements on environmental issues - including on biodiversity, genetic resources, biosafety of biotechnology, and farmers' rights.
Her professional practice focuses on the implementation of participatory action research projects with indigenous peoples and peasant communities, and advice on public policies and programs in agroecology and biodiversity. Her work is transdisciplinary, with a territorial perspective of food systems and gender, intergenerational approaches (particularly children and youth) and human rights and the rights of peasants. She advocates for different expressions of arts as an integral part of research.
Job Titles:
- Research and Project Assistant
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Inès joined IPES-Food in spring 2023 as our research and project assistant. She is a multilingual specialist on the colonial legacies underpinning today's political economy - including food systems and migration. Ines holds an MA in Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy from Goldsmiths University of London, and a BA in Political Science and International Relations from the Nova University of Lisbon.
Job Titles:
- Food Security / Governance & Policy / Local Food Systems
- Member of the IPES
Jane Battersby is a member of the IPES-Food panel, an urban geographer with an interest in all things food, and associate professor at the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her current areas of interest are urban food systems, urban food policies and governance - with a focus on African cities.
She was awarded the Premio Daniel Carasso laureate in 2017 for her work on food system sustainability. She is actively engaged in international, national, provincial and local government policy processes in an advisory or consultative position. She also works with community groups to increase agency in local food system governance.
She serves on the advisory boards of several international research projects, has served as a member of the Independent Expert Group of the Global Nutrition Report, is leading a report on strengthening urban and peri-urban food systems at the UN High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) - where she was also a team member on its Reducing Inequalities for Food Security and Nutrition report. Jane holds a DPhil from Oxford University.
Job Titles:
- Corporate Power / Food Security / Governance & Policy
- Member of the IPES
Jennifer Clapp is a member of the IPES-Food panel, professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo, Canada, and a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the UN Food Systems Coordination Hub.
Joji Cariño is a member of the IPES-Food panel, and has been an active campaigner and advocate over the past 35 years on indigenous peoples' human rights, at international, national and community levels. She is the senior policy advisor and former director of Forest Peoples Programme (UK).
She also worked as indigenous policy advisor and team leader of the Indigenous Peoples' and Biodiversity Programme Tebtebba Foundation (Indigenous People's International Centre for Policy, Research and Education) from 2004-2013.
She is an environment and development educator and researcher with expertise on indigenous knowledge and traditional occupations, cultural and biological diversity, international standards on forests, water and energy, extractive industries and corporate accountability.
An additional focus of her work is community-based monitoring and information systems as tools for local governance. Indigenous and local communities are supported to map and monitor the state of their lands, territories and resources, track implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and hold governments and corporations to account. She co-ordinated an international expert seminar on indicators relevant for indigenous peoples.
She has served as member of the UN Secretary General's Scientific Advisory Board (UNSAB) (2014-2016), as commissioner on the World Commission on Dams (1998-2000), and as executive secretary of the International Alliance of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of the Tropical Forests (1994-1999).
Job Titles:
- Corporate Power
- Member of the IPES
Jomo Sundaram is a member of the IPES-Food panel, and senior adviser to the Khazanah Research Institute. He is also a fellow of the Academy of Science, Malaysia, and emeritus professor, University of Malaya.
He was UN assistant secretary general for economic development in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) (2005-12), research coordinator for the G24 Intergovernmental Group on International Monetary Affairs and Development (2006-12), assistant director general for Economic and Social Development at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) (2012-15), and third Tun Hussein Onn Chair in International Studies at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia (2016-17). He received the 2007 Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.
He has authored and edited over a hundred books and translated 12 volumes besides writing many academic papers and media articles.
Job Titles:
- Co - Chair
- Co - Chair of IPES - Food
Lim Li Ching is co-chair of IPES-Food and a senior researcher at Third World Network (TWN), with expertise on biodiversity, biosafety and sustainable agriculture. TWN is an international policy research and advocacy NGO based in Malaysia, focusing on the rights of peoples in the Global South, a fair distribution of world resources, and ecologically sustainable development that fulfills human needs.
A leading civil society voice in numerous intergovernmental processes, she has also served on various expert groups established under the Convention on Biological Diversity and its Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. She has contributed to various international publications on sustainable agriculture (e.g. by UNESCAP, UNEP, UNCTAD) and was a regional lead author of the International Assessment on Agricultural Science, Technology and Knowledge for Development (IAASTD). And she currently serves as an advisor to the Agroecology Fund. She has a B.Sc. in Ecology and an M.Phil. in Development Studies.
Mamadou Goïta is a member of the IPES-Food panel, the executive director of the Institute for Research and Promotion of Alternatives in Development (IRPAD), and a development socio-economist and specialist in education and training systems. He works closely with farmers' organizations in Africa and other continents.
He has been executive secretary of ROPPA (West Africa Farmers and Producers Organization). Prior to his position at IRPAD, he worked in West Africa with UNICEF, UNDP, OXFAM-Belgium and ACORD. He is a founding member of COPAGEN (the Coalition to Protect African Genetic Heritage) and a founding and honorary member of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA). He has also worked as academic support for the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) Civil Society Mechanism Working Group on ‘smallholders' access to markets' (2016) and was director of CODESRIA's Institute of Governance (2014). In 2013, he served as a project team member of the CFS's High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition.
He currently sits on a numerous international boards - including Afrique Verte International, More & Better network, Global Green Grants, Enda Pronat, IED Africa - and is a member of several African networks (Pan-African Network in the Defence of Migrants' Rights (PANiDMR), African Development Bank's CSOs coalition, AIMES, POSCAO). He teaches at different universities and has an integrated agroecological farm in Mali.
Melissa Leach is a member of the IPES-Food panel, and is the forthcoming executive director of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative - a unique collaboration between the University of Cambridge and ten leading internationally focused biodiversity conservation organisations. She is also a professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Previously she was Director of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, and co-founder of the ESRC STEPS (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) Centre, with its pioneering pathways approach to innovation, sustainability and development issues.
Her interdisciplinary, policy-engaged research in Africa and beyond links environmental, agricultural, health, technology and gender issues. Her highly-cited publications include the books Dynamic Sustainabilities: Technology, Environment, Social justice (2010, Earthscan); Green Grabbing (co-ed, 2012, Taylor and Francis); The Politics of Green Transformations (co-ed, 2015, Taylor and Francis) and Gender Equality and Sustainable Development (ed, forthcoming).
She is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academy for Social Sciences, Academia Europaea and the International Science Council and was awarded a CBE in 2017 for services to social science. She has been vice-chair of the Science Committee of Future Earth and lead author of several UN reports, as well as the 2016 World Social Science Report 2016 on Challenging Inequalities.
Job Titles:
- Member of the IPES - Food
Million Belay is a member of the IPES-Food panel; co-founder and general coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) - a network of farmers' organizations, NGO networks, consumer movements and small-scale producers advocating for agroecology, food sovereignty, and the rights of small-scale food producers in Africa; and he is an expert on forestry conservation, indigenous livelihoods and food and seed sovereignty.
Molly Anderson is a member of the IPES-Food panel, and a specialist in hunger, food systems, and multi-actor collaborations for sustainability, who has created interdisciplinary academic programmes and participated in local and regional food system planning. She holds the William R. Kenan Jr. Chair in Food Studies at Middlebury College, Vermont, where she teaches on hunger and food security, food policy, and sustainability.
She is especially interested in food system resilience, human rights in the food system, the right to food in the US, and the transition to a post-petroleum food economy. She also works to bridge the interests and concerns of academics, NGOs and community-based activists. She is involved in food system planning at local, state and regional scales, and participates in the national Inter-Institutional Network for Food, Agriculture & Sustainability, and the regional Food Solutions New England network. She has worked as a consultant for domestic and international organizations such as Oxfam America, and was the founding director of the Agriculture, Food and Environment Graduate Program in the School of Nutrition Science & Policy at Tufts University, where she also directed its Institute of the Environment for two years.
She earned a Ph.D. in Systems Ecology from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a B.S. and M.S. in natural resource management and a certificate in Latin American Studies from Colorado State University.
Nettie Wiebe is a member of the IPES-Food panel, and has combined farming with social activism, political engagement and academic pursuits throughout her life. She farms in Saskatchewan, Canada growing organic crops and raising cattle.
She served in elected leadership positions of the National Farmers Union (NFU) for ten years. Under her leadership, the NFU helped found and build La Via Campesina (LVC), the global peasant, small-scale farmers, rural workers and indigenous peoples' movement. Initially the only woman on the International Coordinating Committee of LVC, she encouraged and inspired women to take their rightful places as key leaders in defending food sovereignty.
She is a professor emerita of St. Andrew's College, University of Saskatchewan, having taught ethics and social justice courses there from 1999-2015. She has spoken in hundreds of venues and contributed numerous articles and interviews to local and national media. Her publications include co-editing two volumes on food sovereignty (2010), co-authoring several articles on land grabbing in Saskatchewan, and contributing chapters to Critical Perspectives in Canadian Food Studies (3rd ed. 2022) and Canadian Social Policy for Social Workers (2018).
Job Titles:
- Consulting Director
- Specialist
Nick is a specialist in agri-food, trade and development policy, with a background in media, communications and political research. From 2011-2014 Nick was a member of the support team to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food Olivier De Schutter (Rapporteur from 2008-2014) as the communications and research assistant. Previously, he worked as a journalist for Agra Europe, providing coverage of EU agriculture and trade policy, and writing in detail on Common Agricultural Policy reform, biofuels, GMOs, trade negotiations and other issues affecting the EU agricultural sector. From 2010-2014 he also blogged on EU politics for EU Observer. Nick holds an MA in Modern Languages from Cambridge University and an MSc in Globalization and Development from the University of Antwerp.
Job Titles:
- Member of the IPES - Food
Nicolas Bricas is a member of the IPES-Food panel, an expert in the socio-economics of food systems, and senior scientist at CIRAD, the French agricultural research and international cooperation organization working for the sustainable development of tropical and Mediterranean regions. His main research topics are the effects of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and liberalization on food systems and food styles - i.e. consumption, practices and representations of food - in Africa and Asia.
Job Titles:
- Project Manager ( Maternity Leave )
Nicole joined IPES-Food in 2021 to manage IPES-Food research projects and activities, with a focus on climate and global governance. Nicole is a multilingual food system scientist with a special interest in the sociology of food and eating. She obtained a Master of Science in Integrated Natural Resource Management from Humboldt University in Berlin, and a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies from the University of Washington in Seattle.
Job Titles:
- Co - Chair
- Co - Chair of IPES - Food
Olivier De Schutter is co-chair of IPES-Food, and since May 2020 is the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. He also served as UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food from 2008-14 and was elected to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights from 2014-20.
With an LLM from Harvard University, and a PhD from the Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain), he teaches at UCLouvain and at Sciences Po Paris, and has taught in the past at New York University, Columbia University, University of California, Berkeley and Yale University.
In 2013 he was awarded Belgium's top scientific award, the Prix Francqui, for his contribution to the advancement of EU law, the theory of governance, and human rights law. In 2002-06, he chaired the EU Network of Independent Experts on Fundamental Rights, a high-level group of experts which advised the European Union institutions on fundamental rights issues. His publications are in the area of international human rights and fundamental rights in the EU, with a particular emphasis on economic and social rights and governance.
Job Titles:
- Corporate Power / Food Security / Governance & Policy
- Member of the IPES
Pat Mooney is a member of the IPES-Food panel, a co-founder and former director of ETC Group (the Action Group on Erosion, Technology, and Concentration), an IFOAM Ambassador (International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements), and is chair of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP).
A Canadian national, for more than 55 years, he has worked within international civil society and is the author or co-author of several books on the politics of seeds, agrobiodiversity, biopiracy and new technologies including genomics and nanotechnologies and big data.
He is a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (1985) in the Swedish Parliament, the Pearson Peace Prize (1998) from Canada's Governor General, and the American Giraffe Award (for ‘sticking his neck out'), and received honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Waterloo (Canada) and the 17 Advanced Research Institutes (Mexico) in 2017.
He was lead author for the IPES-Food/ETC "Long Food Movement" Report, the IPES-Food study on agribusiness concentration, "Too Big to Feed", and authored another report for the German Rosa Luxembourg foundation on big data in agriculture, "Breaking the Chain". He is retired and living with his wife in rural Québec.
Job Titles:
- Corporate Power
- Member of the IPES
Phil Howard is a member of the IPES-Food panel, a professor in the Department of Community Sustainability at Michigan State University, and an expert in food system changes and the visualization of these trends.
He has authored prominent contributions to the public debate on concentration and power in food systems. He has analyzed increasing consolidation in numerous industries, including processed organic foods, beer and commercial seeds; and is the author of Concentration and Power in the Food System: Who Controls What We Eat? (2016, 2021, Bloomsbury Academic). His work has been featured extensively in media outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, and more. He conducted research at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 2002 to 2006, was a visiting scholar in the Division of Nutrition at the University of Utah in 2013-2014, and a visiting research fellow at Lund University in Sweden in 2021.
He was president of the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society from 2015 to 2016. He holds a PhD in Rural Sociology from the University of Missouri.
Raj Patel is a member of the IPES-Food panel, a film-maker, best-selling author, and a research professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin.
His research on political ecology and food systems has been widely translated and taught, particularly his book "Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System" (2012). He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US House Financial Services Committee and the European Union, and has conducted research across different scales of policy - from global hunger, to the needs of low income communities in Austin, Texas.
He recently completed an award-winning documentary project on climate change, gender and agroecology, The Ants & The Grasshopper. He has scholarly publications in economics, philosophy, politics and public health journals, writes for a range of newspapers, and is committed to democratizing political ecological debate. He has a PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University.
Robbie is an environmentalist and communications specialist, and grew up on an organic farm. He previously worked for over a decade for Friends of the Earth Europe - where his work helped to save EU biodiversity protection laws from deregulation; to win EU regulations on EU biofuels imports; and to achieve widespread press and social media coverage on climate and energy issues. Robbie holds an MSc in Climate Change & International Development from the University of East Anglia (UEA), and an MA in International Relations from the University of St Andrews.
Job Titles:
- Research and Project Assistant
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Saskia joined IPES-Food in early 2024 as a research and project assistant. She is a multilingual specialist on food systems with a particular interest in food governance and political pluralism. She holds a MSc in Resilient Farming and Food Systems from Wageningen University & Research, and a BSc in Bioscience Engineering from the University of Louvain.
Job Titles:
- Corporate Power
- Member of the IPES
Sofía Monsalve Suárez is a member of the IPES-Food panel, and the secretary general of FIAN International - an international human rights organization working for the right to food and nutrition.
Before becoming secretary general in 2016, she coordinated FIAN's program on land and natural resources for more than 15 years. This work included close collaboration with peasants, family farmers, landless people, fisher folks, indigenous peoples and rural workers organizations.
She has extensive advocacy experience in the UN human rights system, UN-FAO and the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) - contributing to the development of human rights standard setting, including in new areas such as the rights of future generations, and knowledge and technology. Likewise, she has undertaken conceptual work and research particularly on the intersection between human rights, land and natural resource governance in collaboration with various academic institutions. She holds a master's degree in political science and philosophy.
Susan Chomba is a member of the IPES-Food panel, and the director of vital landscapes at the World Resources Institute (WRI), where she leads WRI Africa's work on forest protection and landscape restoration, food systems transformation, water and governance. She is a scientist with extensive research and development experience in more than 20 countries across Africa.
She is a global ambassador for the Race to Zero and Resilience under the UN High Level Champions for Climate Action. She serves on advisory boards of several organizations and has received several global recognitions for her work - including being named as one of the BBC's 100 Women of 2023, one of Global Landscapes Forum's ‘16 Women Restoring the Earth' in 2021, and one of the top 25 women shaping climate action globally by Greenbiz.
She holds a PhD in forest governance from the university of Copenhagen, Denmark, two MSc.s from the universities of Copenhagen and Bangor, and a BSc. in forestry from Moi University in Kenya.
Job Titles:
- Member of the IPES - Food
Yiching Song, is a member of the IPES-Food panel, a senior researcher in the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and since 2016 is program leader of the United Nations Environment Programme - International Ecosystem Management Partnership in the Chinese Academy of Science. She is also founder and adviser of the China's Farmers' Seed Network.