Who am I?
Professional version…
I’ve been working in food, nutrition and health since 1984 when I spent two years as a volunteer in a rural development project in (what is now) Telangana, South India – working with Koya and Lambadi tribal communities in twenty-five hamlets in a forest near the Godavari. In 1988, I completed a PhD in Human Nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and then spent the 1990s working with FAO in Rome, the UN Standing Committee on Nutrition in Geneva, UNICEF India in Delhi and several international agencies, bilaterals and NGOs.
From 1999-2021, I worked with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington DC, Geneva and the UK, leading several initiatives, including a consortium on the double burden of malnutrition, the Regional Network on AIDS, Livelihoods and Food Security (RENEWAL), two multi-partner research program consortia (Transform Nutrition and LANSA), the Stories of Change project and the nutrition policy flagship of the Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) program among other projects.
Personal version
I live in the South Downs national park, near this…
I cycle a lot…
Back in 2019, I enrolled part-time in a creative writing course in Brighton, wrote a novel and then in 2021, I left the policy research world. After more than two decades with IFPRI, I needed a change (….this was certainly not ‘retirement’, whatever that means)
I couldn’t spend more of my life writing large research proposals while the ‘know-do gap’ was widening into an abyss. We have enough knowledge to act. Of course, policy and program research will always be key, but the biggest block now is not a lack of knowledge, it’s a lack of action. Facta, non verba.
'FOOD FIGHT’ is my new book, published by Canongate (UK), Pegasus/Simon & Schuster (USA), HarperCollins (Canada) and Zhejiang (China).
Yes, I know it’s more words…but they’re different words for a different audience!
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