Johan Swinnen

Johan Swinnen is director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and managing director of Systems Transformation at CGIAR. He is a member of the Advisory Committee On Voluntary Foreign Aid (ACVFA), USAID; Commissioner in the Food Systems Economics Commission; Co-Chair of the Think20 (T20) Task Force on Climate Change, Sustainable Energy, & Environment; and a member of the Champions 12.3 Leadership Group to Reduce Food Loss & Waste.

From 2005 to 2019, he was professor of economics & director of the LICOS Centre for Institutions & Economic Performance at KU Leuven (Belgium) and senior research fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels. Earlier he was lead economist at the World Bank (2003-2004) and economic adviser to the European Commission (1998-2001). He has been a visiting professor at various universities and a frequent adviser to institutions such as the World Bank, OECD, FAO and EBRD.

Dr. Swinnen earned his PhD from Cornell University and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Göttingen and the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra. He is a fellow of the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association (AAEA) and of the European Association of Agricultural Economists (EAAE). He served as president of the International Association of Agricultural Economists (2012-2015).

Dr. Swinnen has published extensively on agricultural & food policies, international development, political economy, institutional reforms, trade, & global value chains. His recent books The Political Economy of Agricultural and Food Policies (2018) and COVID-19 and Global Food Security (2020) both received awards from the AAEA and EAAE.