Future Harvest - Ecoagriculture: Strategies to Feed the World and Save Wild Biodiversity

Jeffrey McNeely worked in Asia for twelve years following his training in anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles. He spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in southern Thailand, five years at the Association for Conservation of Wildlife in Bangkok, and two years studying the relationship between people and nature on the Tibetan border in the Himalayas of eastern Nepal. He spent three years in Indonesia as World Wildlife Fund-IUCN (World Conservation Union) representative, establishing IUCNs first country program and running some thirty-five conservation projects in that country. He joined IUCN proper in 1980, designing conservation programs, advising governments and conservation organizations on conservation policy and practice, and producing a variety of technical and popular publications. As Secretary-General of the IV World Congress on National Parks and Protected Areas (Caracas 1992), McNeely helped develop new concepts for relating people to protected areas. Formerly Director of IUCNs Biodiversity Programme and currently Chief Scientist, he has contributed to all of the major global biodiversity initiatives. He has advised over fifty governments on their biodiversity strategies and action plans and was a founder of the Global Biodiversity Forum. He has published numerous papers and over forty books, including Soul of the Tiger; Mammals of Thailand; Economics and Biological Diversity; Conserving the Worlds Biological Diversity; Partnerships for Conservation; Protecting Nature: Regional Reviews of Protected Areas; National Parks Conservation and Development; and The Great Reshuffling: Human Dimensions of Invasive Alien Species.

Sara J. Scherr is an agricultural and natural resource economist, specializing in tropical land and forest policy. While completing her B.A. in economics from Wellesley College, she studied deforestation in Costa Rica. A Fulbright Scholar, she received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in international economics at Cornell University (1983), with theses on river basin development programs in Mexico and impacts of the oil boom on Mexican cocoa producers. At the Food Research Institute of Stanford University, she compared oil boom impacts on agriculture in Indonesia, Mexico, and Nigeria. She then joined the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry in Nairobi, Kenya, as a Rockefeller fellow and later Principal Researcher, developing methods for on-farm agroforestry research. In 1992, she joined the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C., as a Research Fellow, where she led the Policies for Sustainable Intensification in Fragile Lands program, with field studies in the hillsides of Honduras and Ethiopia. She is presently Senior Policy Analyst of Forest Trends, and Advisor to the Future Harvest Foundation. She is also an adjunct professor at the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department of the University of Maryland, College Park. Her current research is on policies to promote ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes, forest markets for low-income producers, economic impacts of land degradation, and community watershed management. She has published over 100 papers and nine books, including Agriculture and the Oil Syndrome; Costs, Benefits, and Farmer Adoption of Agroforestry; Policy Research for Sustainable Development in Mesoamerican Hillsides; Pilot Assessment of Global Ecosystems: Agroecosystems; Response to Land Degradation; and Trees on the Farm: Assessing the Adoption Potential of Agroforestry Practices in Africa.