IFPRI Board of Trustees
In recent years, Fawzi Al-Sultan has worked closely with the Government of Kuwait in its efforts to open up the economy by transforming the country into a trade and investment hub. As Senior Partner with F&N Consultancy, recent assignments have included a competitiveness study for Kuwait, follow-up on the Prime Minister’s trip to Asia and taking a leading role in the free trade negotiations with the United States and Singapore. From 2001 to 2004, he served as Secretary General of Kuwait's Higher Committee for Economic Development and Reform.
A well-known figure throughout the CGIAR, Mr. Fawzi Sultan was at the helm of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) from 1993 to 2001. As President of IFAD, he was instrumental in that organization’s decision to become the CGIAR’s fourth sponsor.
Before joining IFAD, he served the World Bank as Executive Director for 10 years. During his tenure with the Bank, he was a member of the Joint Audit Committee for five years, chairing that committee for four of those years. He also chaired the Committee of Administrative Matters and was a member of the Pension Finance Committee. From 1990 to 1993, when he left the Bank to join IFAD, he held the prestigious position of Dean of the Executive Directors.
He has worked with the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development, and has held senior positions in such prestigious financial institutions as the Bank of Kuwait and the Middle East, IFABANQUE SA Paris, and the United Bank of Kuwait in London. He has authored numerous publications on finance and development.
He chairs the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture in Dubai and is deputy chair of the Arab Water Academy hosted by the United Arab Emirates, and is on the Board of Kuwait Petroleum Corporation and the Board of Trustees of ICARDA.
Csaba Csaki is a native of Hungary. He received a PhD in agricultural economics in Hungary and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Csaki is Professor of Agricultural Economics at the Budapest Corvinus University, as well as being the former rector of Budapest University of Economic Sciences. Currently, he is also Head of department and member of the Monetary Board of the Hungarian National Bank. He was a Senior Advisor for Strategy and Policy in the Agriculture and Rural Development Department of the World Bank, and the principal author of the Bank’s current rural development strategy (“Reaching the Rural Poor“). During the economic transition period of the 1990s, Dr. Csaki led the World Bank’s analytical work on agricultural policies and food and agriculture sectors in Central and Eastern Europe. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he was the leading agricultural and rural policy advisor on global level at the World Bank.In this capacity he had close contacts with the CGIAR system and visited many of the institutes. He is one of the world’s leading experts on agricultural policy, development, and economic transition in Central and Eastern Europe. He has close contacts with FAO as well. During the last several years, Dr. Csaki has been working intensively on rural development issues in the developing world and on agricultural policy developments in Central and Eastern Europe and specifically in the new member states after EU accession. He served as a regional coordinator of the global Regoverning Markets in Agriculture Project from 2004 to 2008. He has edited, authored or co-authored numerous books and more than 200 articles.
He is member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and honorary member of the Ukrainian and Georgian Academy of Sciences. He received honorary doctoral degrees from De Paul University, Chicago, USA, Ghent University, Belgium, Szent Istvan University, Gödöllő, Hungary. He served as President of the International Association of Agricultural Economists from 1991–1994 and honorary life member of the association. He was vice-president of the European Association of Agricultural Economists from 1985-1987. He is a fellow of the European Association of Agricultural Economists. Since 1992 he is member of the International Policy Council for Agriculture and Trade. Dr Csaki is member of a number of editorial boards internationally and in Hungary.
Shenggen Fan
Director General, Ex Officio, China
Dr. Shenggen Fan, a citizen of China, is the newly appointed Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Previously, he was Director of the Development Strategy and Governance Division of IFPRI. Since joining IFPRI in 1995, Dr. Fan served as a Senior Research Fellow and led IFPRI's program on public investment. Prior to IFPRI, he held positions at the International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR) in the Netherlands and the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology at the University of Arkansas. He received his PhD in applied economics from the University of Minnesota, and his bachelor's and master's degrees from Nanjing Agricultural University in China.
Dr. Fan's major research includes pro-poor development strategy, pro-poor investment, and rural-urban linkages in developing countries, focusing mainly on Asia, Africa, and Middle East. He currently directs a research division that works on governance, development strategy, public investment, and rural-urban linkages; and country strategy support in China, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Uganda, and other countries.
He has served in editorial board of various academic journals and is currently an Executive Committee member of the International Association of Agricultural Economists.
He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Outstanding Alumni Award in Applied Economics and the Distinguished Leadership Award for Internationals, both from the University of Minnesota, and the Outstanding Young Scholar award from the National Science Foundation of China.
Ross G. Garnaut (r.garnaut@cgiar.org) is Professor of Economics at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University. An expert on economic development, public finance, and international economic relations in the Asia-Pacific region, Garnaut is the author of numerous books and influential scholarly articles on these topics. He has frequently been a consultant to the Australian government. From 1985 to 1988, he was the Australian Ambassador to the People's Republic of China, and from 1994 to 2000, he chaired the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. He currently serves on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals and on the governing boards of various research organizations. He also sits on the boards of several private businesses, serving as board chair of Lihir Gold Ltd. and Lonely Planet Publications, the world's largest publisher of travel guides. Garnaut is an officer of the Order of Australia. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. in economics from The Australian National University.
Barbara Harriss-White
United Kingdom
Barbara Harriss-White is the University Professor of Development Studies, and Director of Queen Elizabeth House , Oxford University. She was the Founder-Director of Oxford's M.Phil. in Development Studies. She works (through field research) in two areas of political economy. The first is the regulation of the informal economy, which builds on years of fieldwork on agrarian markets, especially in food grains: her most recent books in this area are India Working: Essays on Economy and Society, Cambridge University Press, 2003; India's Market Society, Three Essays Press, 2005; Trade Liberalisation and India's Informal Economy, OUP, 2006 and Rural Commercial Capital and the Left Front, OUP 2007. Her second area of interest is manifold aspects of deprivation, on which she has published Illfare in India, Sage, 1999, Outcast from Social Welfare: Adult Disability in Rural South India, Books for Change, 2002; Globalisation and Insecurity, Palgrave, 2002 and Defining Poverty, Palgrave 2007. She has a paper on destitution in World Development 2005 and is currently working on caste discrimination in business. The two interests come together in a long term study of rural transformation in Southern India in which, among many other aspects of agricultural production, she has been tracking irrigation, fertiliser, energy, production technology and the marketed surplus; and among aspects of welfare: poverty, food and nutrition (including alcohol), education, drinking water, sanitation, waste, disability, and rural social security - all published in Rural India Facing the 21st Century, Anthem, 2004. Future work will be focused on energy.
Masayoshi Honma is Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Tokyo University. Previously, he was affiliated with Seikai University, Otaru University of Commerce, and Tokyo Metropolitan University. He has been a Visiting Professor at Australian National University and a professional staff member at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. From 1989 to 1991, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at IFPRI. Honma received his Ph.D. in economics at Iowa State University, and has published widely in both Japanese and English.
Mohamad Ikhsan is the special advisor to the Vice President of the Republic of Indonesia. Earlier he was special advisor to the Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs. He is concurrently an associate professor at the University of Indonesia. Before joining the government, he was the director for the Institute of Economics and Social Research University of Indonesia. He also serves as a non-executive board member at several state owned enterprises and private companies. He has Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA and a Master's Degree in Economics from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.
Kabba Thomas Joiner has served as vice dean clinical at the University of Ilorin, executive secretary of the West African Post-graduate Medical College, and executive director of the West African Health Community, an intergovernmental organization made up of the five English-speaking West African states. Since 2000, he has been director general of the West African Health Organisation in Burkina Faso, an intergovernmental organization whose membership comprises the 15 West African states. He completed his term in 2008 and is currently a consultant to AMREF (African Medical Research Foundation). In November 2008, he received a prize for Leadership in Advocacy for Food Fortification in West Africa from the Food Fortification Initiative.
Jean Kinsey is a Professor in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota, where she has been on the faculty since 1976, and is also Co-Director of The Food Industry Center at the University. She received her Ph.D. in agricultural economics from the University of California at Davis. Her research and teaching has been on food consumption trends and demographic changes in the household, information economics, the value of time, American Indian gambling impacts on local communities, and consumer confidence and buying behavior. She has served as Board Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, on the Board of Managers of PJM Interconnection, and President of the American Agricultural Economics Association, of which she is a fellow. Professor Kinsey has been a consultant to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, USAID, the Federal Reserve Bank, AT&T, and various legal firms and food companies.
Cecilia López Montaño
Colombia
Cecilia López Montaño is President of the Agenda Colombia Foundation in Bogotá, Colombia. The Foundation promotes and develops, economic, political and social research, and public policies in Colombia and developing countries. She is also a consultant to the World Bank, IFAD, and ECLAC. She has served in the Colombian government as Minister of Planning, Minister of Agriculture, Minister of the Environment, and Minister in Charge of National Policies for Women's Equity. She also was Colombia's Ambassador to the Netherlands and headed the Colombian delegation to several United Nations Conferences. In her academic career, López taught both economics and demography at universities in Colombia, and was the founding Dean of the Faculty of Economics at Universidad Piloto. She received her B.A. in economics from the Universidad de Los Andes, where she also did her postgraduate work in demography. She did additional postgraduate work in the economics of education at the Centro de Estudios Educativos in Mexico. López is a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Water Management Institute and previously was a member of the International Advisory Council of IFPRI's 2020 Vision Initiative.
Amrita Patel is presently the Chairman of the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) of India.
As the Dairy Board’s Managing Director, Dr. Patel was responsible for the implementation of India’s national dairy program, Operation Flood—the largest program in the world using food aid for development. The program has helped to promote, finance, and deliver a variety of supporting services to a cooperative dairy structure that presently includes more than 13 million members in over 100,000 village dairy cooperative societies across the country. She has played a major role in focusing on the importance of not only enrolling women as members, but of encouraging and training women to play elected leadership roles in dairy cooperatives. She is a Board member of a unique program—South Asia Pro Poor Livestock Policy Program—a joint initiative of NDDB and FAO.
Dr. Patel has been a Director, Central Board of Directors, Reserve Bank of India, and a Director on the Board of National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD). She was also a member on the Board of the International Livestock Research Institute. Dr. Patel was a member of a High Powered Committee formed by the Agriculture Ministry, Government of India which recently submitted its report on the achievements of the cooperative movement during the last 100 years and recommendations to address the challenges being faced by the movement in the light of changing social and economic developments.
Her activities have not been confined to livestock and dairying. Appreciation of the inseparable interlinkages between dairy animals, their owners and the productivity of the lands on which they depend led Dr. Patel to set up the National Tree Growers' Cooperative Federation (NTGCF) in 1988. The NTGCF undertook work with village institutions in several States to restore through revegetation the productivity of village commons. Realizing the limitations of the NTGCF’s work, she set up the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) which has a wider scope and a broader vision that would lead to strengthening the different ecosystems in which these projects are located. This would result in revitalizing the hydrological and nutrient cycles thereby providing sustenance to a variety of endemic life forms which in turn would engender a better quality of life for dependent human communities.
Dr. Patel has played a role in environmental advocacy. She was a Trustee, World Wide Fund for Nature, India. She is a member of the Board of Governors, Society for Promotion of Wasteland Development, Chairman of the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), Chairman of the Board of Management of the Sardar Patel Renewable Energy Research Institute.
Dr. Patel’s strong commitment to delivering health services to rural people in general and women in particular, finds expression in her chairing the Charutar Arogya Mandal, a trust that manages a 550-bed rural hospital, medical, physiotherapy, and nursing colleges. The hospital has a number of outreach programs and works closely with the largest NGO in Asia which delivers maternal and infant health care and a unique cancer awareness, education and early detection program through village health workers in over 600 villages of Kheda district in Gujarat.
Dr. Patel is a Trustee of India’s largest private philanthropic Trust—a Tata Trust—Sir Dorabji Tata Trust.
Liliana Rojas-Suarez, a Peruvian national, is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development. She is also the President of the Latin American Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee. From March 1998 to October 2000, she served as Managing Director and Chief Economist for Latin America at Deutsche Bank. Before joining Deutsche Bank, Ms. Rojas-Suarez was the Principal Advisor in the Office of Chief Economist at the Inter-American Development Bank. Between 1984 and 1994 she held various positions at the International Monetary Fund, most recently as Deputy Chief of the Capital Markets and Financial Studies Division of the Research Department. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for International Economics and has also served as a Professor at Anahuac University in Mexico and an Advisor for PEMEX, Mexico's National Petroleum Company. Ms. Rojas-Suarez has also testified before a Joint Committee of the US Senate on the issue of dollarization in Latin America.
In her different capacities as well as an independent consultant, Ms. Rojas-Suarez has advised a large number of governments, banks, corporations and international organizations throughout the world. Ms. Rojas-Suarez has published widely in the areas of financial markets, macroeconomic policy and international economics. Her most recent publications include: "Designing Financial Policies that Work for Latin America: The Role of Markets and Institutions" (Journal of Financial Stability, 2004), "Can International Capital Standards Strengthen banks in Emerging Markets" (The Capco Institute Journal of Finance 2002), "Why So High? Understanding Interest Rate Spreads in Latin America (ed. With P. Brock, IDB, 2000), Financing Development: The Power of Regionalism" (with Nancy Birdsall, Center for Global Development, 2004), "What Exchange Rate Arrangements Work Best for Latin America", World Economic Affairs, (Autumn 2000) and Financial Regulation: Why, How and Where Now? (With C. Gooddhart et al, Routledge, 1998). Ms. Rojas-Suarez holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Western Ontario.
Gunnar Sorbo is Director of the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI), an independent, nonprofit research center focusing on policy-oriented and applied development research. Before he joined CMI in 1994, Sorbo was affiliated with the University of Bergen for over 20 years, and was the first Director of the University's Centre for Development Studies. He also has been a visiting lecturer and visiting fellow at the University of Khartoum. A social anthropologist, Sorbo's professional profile and research interests include development policy and planning; conflict studies and conflict management; social impact assessment (incl. resettlement); agricultural and pastoral systems; and regional analysis and economic adaptations. He is an experienced team leader for policy-oriented reviews and evaluations and has held positions as trustee or member of several boards, including the International Livestock Centre for Africa (now ILRI), the Research Council of Norway (Division of Environment and Development), and the Rafto Foundation for Human Rights. Sorbo received his Ph.D. at the University of Bergen and is the author and editor of numerous books, journal articles, book chapters and commissioned reports.
Michele Veeman is a Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics in the Department of Rural Economy at the University of Alberta, Canada and the previous Chair of that department from 1992 to 2003. She holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, a Masters Degree in Economics from the University of Adelaide, South Australia, and a Bachelors degree in Agricultural Science from Massey University, New Zealand. Her research, graduate student supervision and teaching have focused on the economics of food, agriculture and rural resources and she has published widely in these areas. Recent collaborative research includes studies of consumers' responses and trade-offs relative to food biotechnology (GMOs); how consumers' risk perceptions and decisions are modified by different types of information; and resource use decisions of small-holders in southern Africa. Professor Veeman is a Government of Alberta nominee to Canada's Internal Trade Dispute Panel (1997 to 2006), a previous co-editor of the Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics and a previous President of the Canadian Agricultural Economics Society. She is a Fellow of the Canadian Agricultural Economics Society and an Honorary Life Member of the International Association of Agricultural Economists.
Samuel Wangwe is the chairman of Daima Associates Limited (DAIMA), a private consulting firm based in Dar es Salaam that offers a range of professional services directed towards the economic management and policy analysis. Prior to assuming his current position, he was the policy advisor on coordination of reforms in the Office of the President, Public Service Management, a post he took after eight years as Executive Director of the Economic and Social Research Foundation (ESRF), a nonprofit nongovernmental policy research institute focusing on capacity building in economic and social policy and development management in Tanzania. He is principal research associate with the ESRF and is chairing the Independent Monitoring Group which is tasked to monitor aid relationships between donors and Tanzania government.
He has 35 years experience as an economist and policy researcher and policy analyst and policy advisor, and as economist and an economic advisor to the Government of Tazania. He has authored/co-authored/edited 13 books development and economic management and over 70 published articles in journals and edited books. In addition he has led and/or participated in over 80 consultancies addressing development policy and economic management in a wide range of areas including formulation and implementation of strategies and policies, industrial development, agricultural development, infrastructure, finance and poverty studies.
He holds a bachelors degree in Economics and Statistics, masters degree in Economics, and a doctoral degree in Economics from the University of Dar es Salaam; and has also worked as the head of the Department of Economics as well as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the same university. During a three-year leave of absence from the University, he was senior research fellow at the Institute for New Technologies of the United Nations University in Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Besides the African Technology Policy Studies (ATPS) network, has served on a number of advisory boards including the Bank of Tanzania, the Tanzania Housing Bank, and the National Micro Finance Bank and has chaired several boards including the State Mining Corporation, the National Institute of Productivity, the National Social Security Fund in Tanzania and is currently chairing the Social Action Trust Fund and the Kibaha Education Centre in Tanzania.
He has also been a member of several commissions, special committees, and task forces including the Fourth Five Development Plan Working Committee on Industry and Technology; the Committee for Improving National Statistics; the Secretariat of the Tanzania Advisory Group; the Presidential Commissions on Exports and Salaries; the Tax Force on Restructuring the National Bank of Commerce; the Advisory Committee in Financial Sector Reform, and was Chairperson of the national Consultative Committee on Fast Tracking the East African Federation.
Zhu Ling was born in December 1951 in Yinchuan City, Ninxia Autonomous Region of Hui Nationality, China. In 1988, she received her Ph.D. in Agroeconomics from the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Federal Republic of Germany. In 1981, she obtained her M.A. in Economics at the Wuhan University, Wuhan, China. Since 1981, she has been employed at the Institute of Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. Currently she is the Deputy Director in charge of research and education; and has been a Professorial Fellow since 1992. Her main research interests are rural development and poverty issues.
