Researcher on food and agricultural policy, with a focus on farming technologies and poverty in the developing world.
I do most of my research and consulting in the area of international food and agricultural policy, especially in Africa and the developing world. This topic connects me both to my own family history (my father grew up on a farm in Indiana) and to an important current issues in international development: How to help farmers in Africa – most of whom are women – increase their productivity to better feed their families and escape poverty. In the past decade I have worked in more than a dozen countries in Africa, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and the United States Agency for International Development. My 2008 book from Harvard University Press ("Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa") has a foreword by two Nobel Peace Prize winners, Jimmy Carter and Norman Borlaug. In 2010, Oxford University Press published my book, "Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know." In 2015 Oxford will publish my new book, "The United States of Excess: Food, Fuel, and American Exceptionalism." I am also an Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
